Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
When Isabelle and Theo invite Matthew to stay with them, what begins as a casual friendship ripens into a sensual voyage of discovery and desire in which nothing is off limits and everything is possible.
Bertolucci's 2003 film is visually ravishing — the Paris apartment becomes a hermetic, voluptuous world, and the cinematography by Fabio Cianchetti is genuinely beautiful, blending cinema-history pastiche with intimate sensuality. The film's conception is highly distinctive: weaving the 1968 May uprisings with sexual awakening, cinephilia, and taboo within a pressure-cooker setting gives it a singular voice that is unmistakably Bertolucci's. Acting is competent and committed from all three leads, though Pitt and Garrel occasionally feel more decorative than deep. The plot, while thematically rich, can feel circular and deliberately stagnant — its provocations sometimes outweigh its dramatic momentum. The ending, with the Molotov cocktail and sudden plunge back into street protest, feels abrupt and tonally jarring, undercutting the hermetic spell the film had carefully constructed rather than resolving it with genuine power.