Restored in 4K for its 20th anniversary last year, Bernardo Bertolucci’s penultimate feature The Dreamers is now arriving on a new 4K UHD disc this summer. Marking Eva Green’s first film role, the romantic drama set during the 1968 Paris student riots also stars Michael Pitt and Louis Garrel. While a U.S. release has not been unveiled yet, the region-free 4K UHD set featuring the restoration completed by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna under the supervision of director of photography, Fabio Cianchetti, will debut in the UK on May 13.
Here’s the synopsis:
THE DREAMERS is set in Paris, Spring of 1968: the city is beginning to emerge from hibernation and an obscure spirit of social and political renewal is in the air. Yet Théo, his twin sister Isabelle and Matthew, an American student they have befriended, think only of immersing themselves in another, addictive form of hibernation: moviegoing at the Cinémathèque Française. Night after night, they take their place beside their fellow cinephiles in the very front row of the stalls and feast insatiably off the images that flicker across the vast white screen.
Denied their nightly ‘fix’ when the French government suddenly orders the Cinémathèque’s closure, Théo, Isabelle and Matthew gradually withdraw into a hermetically sealed universe of their own creation, an airless universe of obsessive private games, ordeals, humiliations and sexual jousting which finds them shedding their clothes and their inhibitions with equal abandon. A vertiginous free fall interrupted only, and tragically, when the real world outside their shuttered apartment succeeds at last in encroaching on their delirium.
The two-disc special edition release includes the original NC-17 cut and over three hours of bonus materials, including extensive featurettes on the making of the film and the real events the inspired the story. There’s also a feature commentary with Bernardo Bertolucci, writer Gilbert Adair, and producer Jeremy Thomas, and interviews with Bertolucci, Green, Pitt, Garrel, Adair and Thomas, as well as behind-the-scenes footage, and more.
See the new trailer below and pre-order here.
