If you liked “Saltburn,” consider this much better movie
I was at my mom’s house in the suburbs when I watched Barry Keoghan make love to his bestie’s grave in Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn.”
“Promising Young Woman,” Fennell’s previous film, a rape-revenge thriller for the girlboss generation, was a toothless bid at provocation. “Saltburn” seemed to promise a similar blend of all style, no substance, but the online hype had piqued my curiosity. So, there I was, watching Keoghan as an Oxford student named Oliver become one with the soil, my mother snoozing beside me.
The moment brought back memories from adolescence of the dozens of times she’d walk into my teenage bedroom — or the same living room where I was watching “Saltburn” — to find me slack-jawed in the middle of “Basic Instinct” or “A Clockwork Orange.” Naturally, she always seemed to waltz in during the most morally compromised or sexually bewildering scenes.
One movie in high school that had me constantly looking over my shoulder was “The Dreamers,” Bernardo Bertolucci’s notorious coming-of-age drama. Like “Saltburn,” it’s a story about cloistered wealth and beautiful students with deranged and obsessive desires. An outsider like Oliver, Matthew (Michael Pitt) is a blue-eyed American doing a year abroad in Paris, where he’s pulled into the decadent world of the twins Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green, in her first credited role). The French teenagers live with their intellectual parents in a luxurious loft and frequent the Cinémathèque Française like devout churchgoers. This is 1960s France, when going to the movies had all the luster and sex appeal of rolling up to the hottest nightclub.
Released in the United States 20 years ago this month, “The Dreamers” arrived from overseas radiating scandal. The original version was rated NC-17, but paranoid American distributors, certain that this label would kill its chances at the box office, also released a slightly shorter, R-rated cut. Bertolucci, the Italian director of divisive films like “Last Tango in Paris” (1972) and “The Conformist” (1970), had long established himself as an auteur of sexually explicit cinema. Yet “The Dreamers” pushed the boundaries of the collegiate sex movie, rivaling (and arguably surpassing) what were then Hollywood’s most scandalous stabs at youthful lusting, like “Wild Things” and “Cruel Intentions.”
After their first encounter, Isabelle invites Matthew to dinner at the family home, and he never leaves. The twins’ parents are out of town for an entire month, and Matthew, living in a shoddy hotel room, is easily persuaded to move into his new friends’ loft. Isabelle, with her luscious locks and come-hither gaze, is a big draw, too. But almost immediately, Matthew discovers that Isabelle and Theo are weirdly intimate: The two strut around in the nude, and sleep and use the bathroom together. Their connection is strengthened by their mutual love of cinema. A continual game of charades, in which the challenge is always to guess the movie, turns dark when Theo fails to cite Josef von Sternberg’s “Blonde Venus.” A forfeit means punishment. Isabelle gestures at a poster of Marlene Dietrich, and Theo already knows what to do: As a horrified Matthew watches, Theo masturbates on the image.sex in “The Dreamers” isn’t merely about shoving youthful abandon in our faces, it’s a means of exploring the boundaries between fantasy and reality — sex, in a sense, is about finding a happy balance between unleashing your animal instincts and performing for your partner. Yet the characters are completely blind to where that boundary lies, allowing their fantasies to consume their realities. Isabelle comes close to committing murder-suicide via a gas oven, but a brick that crashes through the window brings her back from the opera playing in her mind.
The uprisings of May 1968 are raging on the streets of Paris. Theo, in particular, is a vocal supporter of the protests, referencing Karl Marx and other radical intellectuals when he talks about the need for a revolution. He may be cultured, but, as Matthew points out, Theo isn’t out on the streets, he’s inside with his sister, reading, smoking and playing make-believe. In this context, everything they do in the apartment — even their mature activities — feels strangely naïve and innocent. The siblings may think they’re worldly by treating sex so casually, but in doing so, they refuse to admit their incestuous feelings for each other just as they refuse to turn their radical talk into real, onthe-ground action.
But then, is the dream of a revolution its own game of smoke and mirrors? This possibility stings, because Bertolucci plays it straight. These days, satire seems to be the dominant mode for addressing upper-class ignorance and wealth disparity (see “The Curse” or “Triangle of Sadness”), but keeping a cool, mocking distance sometimes fails to capture the passion, helplessness and despair churning beneath our layers of intellectual armor.
Fennell has cited “The Dreamers” as an influence on “Saltburn,” which isn’t surprising. Both are about navel-gazing young folks whose perversions are given free rein; unhinged indulgence; and the hypocrisies of privileged people. Oliver is a middle-class nobody who sleeps, murders and scams his way into a fortune by playing an object of pity for moneyed types who consider themselves “woke.” As a class satire, or so “Saltburn” has been labeled, it’s impotent, satisfied with poking fun at the snarky rich and giving us a mindlessly horny, disturbed hero for no reason other than it’s fun and vaguely triumphant for anyone who dreams of living large.
The thing about “Saltburn’s” transgressive moments — the grave humping, the bathwater guzzling, the buck-naked dance through the mansion — is that they inspire little beyond an instinctual eyebrow raise. Watching the film at my mother’s house reminded me of watching racy movies as a teenager, a bit too eager to take in scandalous images without a care for what they actually mean.
That’s certainly what first drew me to “The Dreamers” when I was young. Looking back at it now, its vision of youthful folly — the way it entreats us to think harder about how we relate to the stylish images that shock and seduce us — feels evergreen.