<byline><![CDATA[20th Century Fox, 18, 115 minsDafydd GoffΓÇÖs insider view]]></byline>
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<body><![CDATA[Bernardo Bertolucci’s latest film is all about a ménage à trois: sex, politics and cinema. But hang on, this isn’t another pretentious musing on pop culture. An altogether different kind of threesome occurs after young American student Matthew (Michael Pitt) meets twins Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green) at a protest outside the Cinémathèque Français. Michael moves into the twins’ apartment while their parents are on holiday, becoming engrossed in their fantasy world of films, mind games and transgressive sex acts that makes Marlon Brando’s buttery antics in Last Tango in Paris seem like tonsil hockey. While the insular world of these babes-in-the-woods deteriorates into the kind of squalor that the characters from Withnail and I would be proud to call home, they are blissfully ignorant of the turmoil brewing on the Paris streets. As a result, Bertolucci’s film feels like Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden meets Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, and although his referencing of cult classics can at times be as trying as Tarantino’s, the sumptuous look and exquisite composition more than compensate. This is unashamedly a love letter to the revolutionary fervour and sexual experimentation of 1960s Paris. And it remains an absorbing reverie, before the outside world intrudes for one final, brutal reality check. Although not vintage Bertolucci, this is, however, his best film in years. Extras include a director’s commentary, a making-of documentary and the featurette Outside the Window: Events in France, May 1968.]]></body>
