" Like the visions of a fickle television viewer switching channels from escapist violence to newscast genocide to political debate, LOVE AND ANGER brings together the talents of world class filmmakers Academy Award® winner Bernardo Bertolucci (THE LAST EMPEROR, THE CONFORMIST, LAST TANGO IN PARIS), Marco Bellocchio (DEVIL IN THE FLESH, CHINA IS NEAR), Pier Paolo Pasolini (SALO`, ACCATTONE, TEOREMA), Carlo Lizzani (THE HUNCHBACK OF ROME, THE LAST DAYS OF MUSSOSLINI) and French Nouvelle Vague pioneer Jean-Luc Godard (BAND OF OUTSIDERS, CONTEMPT) to tell five thematically linked stories of love, anger and indifference at the end of the 20th Century."

"Nominated for the Golden Bear Award at the 1969 Berlin Film Festival, LOVE AND ANGER is a portmanteau film in the tradition of DEAD OF NIGHT and NEW YORK STORIES and features a one-time-only assortment of performers including Nino Castelnuovo (ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS), Catherine Jourdan (GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE), Ninetto Davoli (THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW), Andy Warhol Factory member Tom Baker (BLOW JOB) and Living Theatre founders Julian Beck (POLTERGEIST II) and Judith Malina (THE ADDAMS FAMILY)."

"A woman's dangerous and erotic journey beneath the sheltering sky."

A tourist thinks of returning home from the journey's start; A traveler may stay a month, year or forever. Kit (Debra Winger) and Port Moresby (John Malkovich) are travelers. Deeply in love but unable to connect, they externalize their search for each other in a restless trek deeper and deeper in 1940s Saharan Africa. Though each has sex with someone else in the opening reel, their married love-life is an acutely observed series of emotional collisions and gridlock. (Since nothing outside a film exists within the film, we are in some suspense as to whether their 10 year marriage will be consummated.)

This is Debra Winger's story to carry, and it's tempting to see it as a female journey of self-discovery but though she goes through transformations only a handful of actresses could approach, taking real artistic chances baring herself figuratively and literally, it's difficult to say what she learns about herself. The overt message (explicitly stated by Paul Bowles, the book's author, in his role as on looking narrator) is that we think life is infinite, but each day we do something for the last time. how many times will we see the full moon rise before we die? 10 times? 20? Whatever the number, it is finite, smaller than we would guess, and diminishing.

The audience - more than Winger - receives the education here. Pace is the commonest vice great film-makers, but even when this film is slow, there is plenty to look at. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's composition and color are powerful, and the vistas captured unforgettable - particularly one scene set on a palm studded ridge overlooking an Arab city at dusk distilling the full allure of Orientalist painting.

Bertolucci secures his claim to the (probably unwanted) title of "greatest erotic film-maker of all time," which merely requires being a) a great film-maker, and b) recognizing that people absent the sexual dimension are not people, and alive to the sexual harmonics in everything. One tiny example: a shot of Malkovitch and an Arab prostitute in flagrante, framed by a foreground still life of a dark piece of animal fur dripping water. Water and sex are a standard symbolic pair, but the intricate sex/fluid scheme throughout this film is far from trite, given the murderously arid surroundings, and the variety of fluid metaphors (champagne, water and milk symbolize various aspects of love throughout.) It's awful to suspect that this film hasn't been released before because of a close-shot of Malkovich's penis in another scene, since it's a masterful bit of visual narrative.

Bertolucci uses that familiar set-up as jumping-off point for a nostalgic celebration of 1960s French New Wave cinema and 1960s French New Wave film criticism that elevated films like SCARFACE and BLONDE VENUS to the canonical level of Rimbaud or Baudelaire. In particular THE DREAMERS is an homage to Godard's 1964 Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders). The plot is different but the dynamic is all there; a goofy boy, a freakishly handsome boy and a tragically beautiful girl causing trouble in Paris while swapping partners. I would bet money that Bertolucci's primary criterion in casting Eva Green was her ability to duplicate Anna Karina's big-eyed tragic expression with inverted-V eyebrows. Clips from old films are inserted throughout, most interestingly when the trio recreates the race through the Louvre from Bande à Part with the original intercut with the recreation. (The scene made we wonder whether the Louvre has had to add security measures to prevent copy-cat races.)

The connection between cinema and the riots of '68 isn't only in Bertolucci's head. The turmoil that eventually threatened the entire government began as a protest over the ouster of legendary Cinematheque Francais founder of Henri Langlois. (The opening of THE DREAMERS brought to mind the rioting spilling into the Paris premiere of Jean Rollin's LE VIOL DE VAMPIRE-a true story detailed in the book Immoral Tales.)

I enjoyed the heck out of THE DREAMERS, but it does bear the earmarks of a fading artist's work-quietly lovely but self-referential and made with the careful hesitantly of an old man walking down steps. Each shot is as visually rich as a painting, but a carefully posed painting. Fortunately the controversial sexual candor compensates, putting some content pep in the faltering artistic step. (THE DREAMERS might be a bore without the eroticism, but WAR AND PEACE would be a bore without Napoleon. There is a lower artistic threshold for sexy or action packed movies because the content is intrinsically interesting. Subject is an artistic decision and nobody deserves extra credit for picking boring topics.)

The Plot: American student Matthew (Michael Pitt from Hedwig and the Angry Inch), falls in with twin brother and sister Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel) who share his intellectual dream-world devotion to cinema. They playfully challenge each other to identify dialogue and pantomimes from movies. After Matthew accepts their hospitality the movie game becomes a sort of late-night Truth or Dare where the siblings demand sexual performances of each other to pay for missed questions. Matthew knows Theo and Isabelle sleep together in the nude and presumes they're an incestuous couple, but that doesn't stop him from falling hard for Isabelle. (And, to some ambiguous degree, Theo.) Presumably Theo and Isabelle form one personality representing between them the spectrum of everything beautiful and malignant about renaissance and revolution. (It seems that love is the good part and violence the bad part-who saw that coming?)

Eva Green's Isabelle is every inch the siren, complete with Charlotte Rampling-esque exotic eyes and a lithe, aggressively sexy and very European figure that's on constant display. (Throughout most of the film she wears only a transparent negligee of the sort familiar to everyone who has seen Borowczyk's LA BETE.) Theo is a very handsome young man, though more bluntly masculine than most movie heart-throbs. Fair enough, since he's the male half of a male-female duality. Since I'm objectifying the cast here, Matthew looks like Leo DiCapprio's smarter but less pretty brother. The DVD extras include a lot of interesting material about May 1968 when the smell of tear gas permeated the City of Light for weeks.

DVD FEATURES: Aspect ratio 1.85:1; Available subtitles: English, Spanish; Available Audio: English (DD 5.1), French (DD 2.0 Surround), Spanish (DD 2.0 Surround); NC-17 version; Commentary by director Bernardo Bertolucci, writer Gilbert Adair, and producer Jeremy Thomas; "Events of May '68" featurette; "The Making of The Dreamers" featurette; Michael Pitt "Hey Joe" music video; Theatrical trailer.