



The essay examines post-Maoist cinema by looking at two interrelated issues: the portrayal of sexuality and cinephilia during the Maoist period. Sexual urges are inextricable from post-Maoist cinema; in particular, the connection between eros and revolution serves to criticize Maoism from within. Another common trait is the long shadow cast by lms made in the Maoist period. Whether by explicit reference to movie-going in the diegesis or through allusions understood by those familiar with Maoist oldies, post-Maoist cinema tends to be highly cinephilic. The onscreen reemergence of cinephilia – often in conjunction with the eruption of youthful libido – is no low-stakes game; rather, it enables a critical view of Maoism. This essay focuses on The Dreamers (The Dreamers - I sognatori, Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003) through a diachronic and synchronic lens, placing the lm side by side with other movies – the historical precedent La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) and the roughly contemporary Chinese lm In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang canlan de rizi, Jiang Wen, 1994).




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We Have Never Been Chaste. Sexuality and Cinephilia in Post-Maoist Cinema
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We Have Never Been Chaste
Sexuality and Cinephilia in Post-Maoist Cinema
Yomi Braester, University of Washington




Abstract

       The essay examines post-Maoist cinema by looking at two interrelated issues:
       the portrayal of sexuality and cinephilia during the Maoist period. Sexual urges
       are inextricable from post-Maoist cinema; in particular, the connection between
       eros and revolution serves to criticize Maoism from within. Another common
       trait is the long shadow cast by films made in the Maoist period. Whether by
       explicit reference to movie-going in the diegesis or through allusions understood
       by those familiar with Maoist oldies, post-Maoist cinema tends to be highly
       cinephilic. The onscreen reemergence of cinephilia – often in conjunction with
       the eruption of youthful libido – is no low-stakes game; rather, it enables a
       critical view of Maoism. This essay focuses on The Dreamers (The Dreamers - I
       sognatori, Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003) through a diachronic and synchronic lens,
       placing the film side by side with other movies – the historical precedent La
       Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) and the roughly contemporary Chinese film
       In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang canlan de rizi, Jiang Wen, 1994).

    Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (The Dreamers - I sognatori, 2003) is
regarded by many as a post-ideological portrayal of the 1968 Paris riots, a semi-
pornographic revisionist account of French Maoism. Slavoj Žižek writes that
‘[the] shift from political engagement to the post-political Real is perhaps best
exemplified by the films of Bernardo Bertolucci, that arch-renegade […]. This
span achieved full circle with The Dreamers’.1 In this view, the Maoist disruption
of capitalism that fueled the 1968 events, already defused by late twentieth-
century neoliberal cooptation, receives a dog’s burial by Bertolucci. I argue
otherwise: The Dreamers offers a sober-minded, sympathetic corrective; as such
it is a prime example of post-Maoist cinema. As I define it, post-Maoist cinema
explicitly addresses its position as heir to Maoist films. Probing into Maoist
ideology and practice in the 1950s to 1970s, post-Maoist cinema is largely neither
post-political nor flippant. It explores both the allure and limitations of Maoism
and Maoist cinema.

1
    Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), p. 59.

                                                       Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVIII, no. 30, Spring 2018
                                        Yomi Braester


   I examine the position of post-Maoist cinema by looking at two interrelated
issues: the portrayal of sexuality and cinephilia during the Maoist period.
Libidinal passion, and especially young people’s budding sexuality, have been
crucial components of professing Maoism, and sexual urges are inextricable
from post-Maoist cinema. In particular, such films build upon the connection
between eros and revolution to criticize Maoism from within. Another common
trait in post-Maoist cinema is the long shadow cast by films made in the Maoist
period. Whether by explicit reference to movie-going in the diegesis or through
allusions understood by those familiar with Maoist oldies, post-Maoist cinema
tends to be highly cinephilic. The protagonists are avid film watchers; the frame
is filled with movie memorabilia; and the later films imitate earlier classics. The
onscreen reemergence of cinephilia – often in conjunction with the eruption
of youthful libido – is no low-stakes game; rather, it enables a critical view of
Maoism.
   Maoism, as addressed in this essay, is always at a remove from the ideology
and writings of Mao and his apparent followers outside China. Maoism takes the
form of performative acts: it amounts to a pledge of allegiance, often uninformed
of ideology and policy; Maoist references often aim at gaining social capital. Such
self-fashioned Maoism is further veiled by onscreen representation. The films at
hand do not provide straightforward documentation; rather, the directors reflect
on what Maoism could be, or could have been, or might have signified in earlier
films.
   Many studies argue the exact meaning of Maoist ideology, and how it was
interpreted and deployed differently around the world.2 Scholars also debate the
role of sexual repression and liberation among the youth who found themselves
overnight drawing a line from their parents’ generation. Memoirs and novels
suggest the prominence of sex in the life of young people at the time.3 As part of
the film’s plot and imagery, however, the protagonists’ desires are transposed to
a symbolic register. Onscreen carnal and cinephilic passions are commentaries
on historical and current perceptions of Maoism. This essay focuses on The
Dreamers through a diachronic and synchronic lens, placing Bertolucci’s film
side by side with other movies – the historical precedent La Chinoise (Jean-Luc
Godard, 1967) and the roughly contemporary Chinese film In the Heat of the Sun
(Yangguang canlan de rizi, Jiang Wen, 1994). The circumstances in France and
the People’s Republic of China (PRC) diverge, of course, widely: Mao’s policies
were different from how his thought was received and interpreted around the
world. From today’s perspective in particular, a contrarian gesture, even shouting

2
  See for example Robert J. Alexander, Maoism in the Developed World (Westport and London:
Praeger, 2001); Bidyut Chakrabarty and Rajat Kumar Kujur, Maoism in India: Reincarnation of
Ultra-Left Wing Extremism in the Twenty-First Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2010);
Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the
Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010).
3
  See for example Emily Honig, ‘Socialist Sex: The Cultural Revolution Revisited’, Modern China,
29.2 (April 2003), 143-175.

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Maoist slogans, may be welcome in Europe or the U.S. when besieged by the
ultra-right. The PRC, on the other hand, is still ruled by Mao’s party, and the
return to repressive Maoism is possible if not already in motion. In juxtaposing
European and Chinese post-Maoist cinema, I do not claim their affinity as much
as challenge their identification as post-political cinema.
   The reception of The Dreamers resonates with the debate around onscreen
reconstructions of the Maoist period in the PRC. In this article I look also at the
relation between sexuality and Maoism in The Dreamers and in Chinese films.
I argue that the sex in these films, often breaking taboos and represented in
transgressive form, aims at a critical reassessment of Maoism. The question is
not whether such sexual behavior ever took place, but rather what its symbolic
value may be.
   Having just voiced my reservation about Žižek’s reading of The Dreamers,
I should stress the relevance of his reproach of post-politics. Not only has
militant ideological engagement gone out of vogue, but the self-congratulatory
tone in discussing communism in the post-Cold-War era is uncritical and self-
righteous. Žižek disavows the ‘vulgar anti-communist cliché’ that Eastern Bloc
totalitarianism was tragedy, and the return to communism would be a farce.4
To this we may add that communism, murderous and totalitarian as it was, has
always had its farcical side as it could not live up to its utopian ideals.
   In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), Žižek makes the case that
dictatorship is especially vulnerable when it claims to speak in the name of
the people. To undermine such a political system one needs not to deride the
leader but the people. Showing ‘ordinary people […] in their daily conformism,
stupidity, egotistic lust’ proves that ‘there is no mythic people which serves as the
ultimate legitimization’. Indeed, some of the most effective cinematic blows to
communism were delivered in Miloš Forman’s scenes of debauchery mentioned
by Žižek – and in carnivalesque moments in post-Maoist Chinese films. These
episodes should not be dismissed as nihilistic but rather understood as a level-
headed rethinking of Maoist ideology and the Maoist cinematic legacy.


Maoism as an Adolescent Fantasy

   The Dreamers is told from the perspective of Matthew, an American student in
Paris in 1968. He frequents the Cinémathèque Française and identifies himself
as a cinephile. During the demonstrations over the firing of the director of the
Cinémathèque – the event that foreshadowed the more overtly political riots
three months later – he meets a brother and sister his age, Theo and Isabelle.
Raised by an artistic bourgeois couple happy to pay lip service to the revolution
and to buy social stability with their money, the two siblings take a more


4
    Žižek, p. 1.

                                                                                  97
                                          Yomi Braester


rebellious approach. Before storming the barricades at the end of the movie,
the siblings show their nonconformism by studying Mao’s Little Red Book and
carrying on an incestuous relationship in front of Matthew. The plot follows the
three young people as they lead a carefree existence together, without any grown-
ups to watch over their antics. They seem to represent a microcosm of the Maoist
movement in 1968 Paris.
   In between increasingly transgressive sexual acts – and in conjunction with
them – the three reaffirm their fervor for the cinema. They often challenge each
other to recognize reenactments of famous scenes. When Theo fails to recognize
his sister’s version of Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg, 1932), she orders him to
masturbate, in her and Matthew’s presence, to Marlene Dietrich’s photo. Later
Matthew fails to name Scarface (Brian de Palma, 1983) and is coerced into making
love to Isabelle – her virginal experience, it turns out – in front of Theo. (In the
original novel, The Holy Innocents, the brother also rapes Matthew and proceeds
to scatological humiliation.5) The made-to-shock sexual scenes overshadow the
cinephilia and Maoist imagery that facilitate the unusual ménage à trois. The
sexual degradation follows a cinephilic fall from grace as the young men admit
their incompetence in putting image and film title together. In both scenes, the
defeated men are overpowered by artwork hanging behind them – a poster
of La Chinoise and a Chinese print of Mao standing above a sea of red flags,
respectively. Theo has made his room into a Maoist shrine; as the three act out
their fantasies, the ideological backdrop literally frames them and symbolically
creates an ineluctable scaffolding around them.
   The poster of La Chinoise alludes to many strands in Bertolucci’s film: it refers
to the siblings’ cinephilia and to their interest in Marxism, as Godard’s film is
viewed as presaging the events of 1968 and marking the beginning of Godard’s
Maoist filmmaking period. More importantly for the purposes of this essay, the
poster suggests an analogy between La Chinoise and The Dreamers. Godard’s film
is hardly an encomium to 1960s French Marxism; rather, it offers a sympathetic
criticism of the fate of ideological fervor in the hands of well-meaning but naïve
youth. A five-person Maoist cell is ensconced in a bourgeois Paris apartment,
where they make love, read the Little Red Book, and lecture to each other.
The one woman who comes from the countryside parrots their slogans, serves
their meals in porcelain ware, and occasionally prostitutes herself to finance
them. The leader, a woman who fancies herself as a Chinese revolutionary by
wearing a Parisian couture version of the Mao suit, attempts a botched political
assassination. Godard’s Marxist sympathy and his later fashioning of La Chinoise
as a Maoist manifesto notwithstanding, La Chinoise reads as a satire.6
   The Dreamers is often compared to The Terrible Children (Les Enfants
terribles, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1950), which also describes a love triangle that
includes two incestuous siblings. Bertolucci seems, however, equally indebted

5
    Gilbert Adair, The Holy Innocents (London: William Heinemann, 1988).
6
    On Godard’s claims that La Chinoise voices his commitment to Marxism, see Wolin, pp. 114-17.

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to La Chinoise, which also takes place almost entirely in a well-heeled Parisian
apartment decorated in Maoist chic, revolves around an enigmatic and sensuous
redhead and, most importantly, features a small group of college-age youngsters
who keep tormenting themselves over finding the correct political response to
current affairs. In structure and ideological content, The Dreamers resembles La
Chinoise rather than The Terrible Children. Insofar as La Chinoise is a Maoist
film, The Dreamers identifies itself as explicitly post-Maoist: not a flattening of
the ideological content, but a nuanced and often critical way of looking back.


Post-Maoist Cinema and Post-Cinema

   The identify-the-movie game played by the protagonists of The Dreamers is
on its face cinephilia gone awry, reduced to a trivia game and at the same time
played for exceedingly high stakes. Yet the scenes also address the viewers of
Bertolucci’s film and signal the post-Maoist fate of cinephilia. Wanda Strauven
has noted that the games in The Dreamers show how movie watching now extends
to the home, where a film can be paused for reflection.7 By this interpretation,
Bertolucci anachronistically introduces a cinephilia divorced from the film theater
through the use of home video. Strauven is correct in seeing The Dreamers as
a reevaluation of cinephilia from the vantage point of the twenty-first century,
but she ignores an important twist in Bertolucci’s presentation of the cinephilic
quiz. The game scenes keep interrupting the diegesis with sequences from the
films to which the youngsters allude. (Such non-diegetic asides also resonate
with La Chinoise.) The film viewers are therefore privy to images and sounds
unavailable to the protagonists. This additional information involves the viewers
in separate challenges to recognize the earlier films. The film viewers identify
with the characters’ cinephilia; yet the viewers are placed in a different position:
unlike the characters, the viewers avail themselves of readymade images, easier
and quicker to spot, that indeed suggest an early twenty-first-century home video
setting.
   Similarly, references to places of cinematic significance around Paris seem to
address Bertolucci’s viewers as much as to gratify the protagonists. The three
young people go to the Louvre, where they reenact the run through the museum
in Godard’s (now) classic Band of Outsiders (Bande à part, 1964). As in the
quiz scenes, the diegesis is intercut with shots from the originary film. To fully
appreciate the parallel, one must observe the scenes from outside, as only the
viewers of The Dreamers can. Such is the anachronistic, meta-cinematic image of
Jean-Pierre Léaud in front of the Cinémathèque, as his younger self appears in
documentary footage from the Cinémathèque demonstrations Roland-François


7
 Wanda Strauven, ‘The Observer’s Dilemma: To Touch or Not to Touch’, in Media Archaeology:
Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011), pp. 148-63 (pp. 159-160).

                                                                                           99
                                       Yomi Braester


Lack notes such references as examples of the current cine-tourism that traces
New Wave film locations. The viewers can return to Paris and Parisian films of
the 1960s.8 Yet Bertolucci does more than serve as a tourist guide: he suggests
that film is now known mostly second-hand, through appropriations and home-
consumption copies. Cinematic images all become déjà-vus. The Dreamers bids
farewell to an era – and suggests the potential of post-cinematic cinephilia.


Were the Red Guards Maoist?

   A prominent contradiction in the behavior of the protagonists in The Dreamers
is their patent lack of political involvement. Matthew tells Theo:

    The Red Guards that you admire – they all carry the same book, they all sing the same
    songs, they all parrot the same slogans. So, in this big, epic movie, everybody is an
    extra. […] if you really believed what you were saying, you’d be […] out there, on the
    street […]. But you’re not out there. You’re inside, with me, drinking expensive wine,
    talking about film, talking about… Maoism. […] I don’t think you really believe it.
    You buy the lamp, and you put up the posters, but it ain’t…

   Matthew refers to the lamp next to him, a glass Mao bust lit from the inside,
as a symbol of Theo’s vacuous and vain relation to Maoism. At the same time,
he criticizes Maoism as practiced in China. Indeed, a frequent question about
French Maoists has been, to what extent did their ideology and actions comport
with Mao’s thought? The Maoist sympathy of prominent thinkers such as
Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and the Tel Quel group in the 1970s seems to
have overshadowed initial misgivings such as those voiced by Matthew, that
Maoism was a fashion, an Orientalist fantasy, an empty use of slogans. As I have
mentioned, traces of such doubt are discernible already in La Chinoise. Yet
if in La Chinoise the group’s choice to isolate itself in an apartment might be
interpreted as keeping apart from the Parisian bourgeoisie, Matthew’s view in
The Dreamers exposes the solipsistic tendencies of the self-proclaimed Maoists.
By putting these words in the mouth of Matthew, with whom the viewers may
identify, Bertolucci – who has repeatedly admitted his debt to the French New
Wave – offers an elegy to the idealism of his generation’s youth.
   The Dreamers is emblematic of how post-Maoist cinema finds itself between a
rock and a hard place, as directors express both nostalgia for an idealistic period
(in which they may have been personally involved) and criticism of past excesses
and equivocations. Such nuanced view of Maoism might be interpreted as selling



8
  Roland-François Lack, ‘The Cine-Tourist’s Map of New Wave Paris’, in Cinematic Urban
Geographies, ed. by François Penz and Richard Koeck (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp.
95-111 (pp. 106-7).

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out. This was the case not only for Bertolucci’s film but also for many movies
produced in the PRC since the mid-1980s.
   In the PRC, post-Maoist cinema may be considered a distinct and prolific
genre. At first came films reassessing the scars of the Maoist period and the
Cultural Revolution in particular, such as The Legend of Tianyun Mountain
(Tianyunshan chuanqi, Xie Jin, 1980) and Blue Kite (Lan fengzheng, Tian
Zhuangzhuang, 1993). Since the late 1980s, most treatment of the Maoist period
turned to double-entendres and sarcasm. In addition to a general disenchantment
with the government’s dogmatism, people felt a growing cognitive dissonance
between the free market economy promoted officially since 1992 and the
Communist Party’s insistence that the country still adhered to Maoist ideology.
‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ looked more and more like capitalism,
and the ensuing inconsistencies were foregrounded in what Western scholars
have called ‘postsocialist cinema’. In fact, films were especially apt vehicles of
criticism: as older cultural elites were marginalized, popular media gained what
approximated moral authority.9 The noncommittal, tongue-in-cheek tone of
many films reflected the realization that in post-Maoist China artists were not
presented with a simple choice between cooptation and dissent. Rather, the
ideological use of art – and the representation of Maoism in particular – were
subject to a complex and fluctuating politics of memory.10
   One of the most prominent films in this category is In the Heat of the Sun
(Yangguang canlan de rizi, Jiang Wen, 1994), whose contents and reception evidence
the complexity of post-Maoist cinema. The plot follows a group of teenagers in
Beijing around 1972. As many youth during the Cultural Revolution, they are left
to their own devices while the parents are away, either sent to reeducation camps
or on military duty. The movie does not show the violence of the first phase of the
Cultural Revolution, when in the late 1960s houses were ransacked and people
brutally beaten. Instead, the teenagers are seen horsing around and discovering
their sexuality. As soon as it came out in 1995, the film ran intro controversy.
Feng Jicai, who had compiled an oral history of the Cultural Revolution, wrote
that the film had nothing to do with his experience. Others noted that there
were many perceptions of the Cultural Revolution, and that young people in
particular lived through the period as ‘a bright, sunny vacation’.11 In the Heat
of the Sun suggests the possibility of multiple, fragmented views of the Maoist



9
   See Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the
Market Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Xudong Zhang, Postsocialism and Cultural
Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008);
Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1996).
10
   See Yomi Braester, ‘The Post-Maoist Politics of Memory’, in A Companion to Modern Chinese
Literature, ed. by Yingjin Zhang (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), pp. 434-451.
11
   Yomi Braester, Witness against History: Literature, Film and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century
China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 192, 200.

                                                                                                101
                                   Yomi Braester


period – at odds with each other, marred by the breakdown of memory, and
mediated through cinematic images.
   In a key moment in the film, the voiceover narrator brings the storyline to
a halt (while the image freezes) and states that he no longer knows what truly
happened: ‘Ha-ha! Don’t believe any of it. I never was this brave or heroic […].
I sadly realize that I have no way to return to reality’. The narrator, identified
as the protagonist Ma Xiaojun speaking from the vantage point of the present,
twenty years after the events, suggests the failure of both Maoist and post-Maoist
historical interventions. The Red Guards’ purported heroism amounted to little,
and the attempt of their generation to reconstruct the past in any meaningful way
is doomed. The director Jiang Wen, who also plays the present-day Ma Xiaojun,
distances himself from Maoist idealism. With self-effacing humor typical of
Chinese post-Maoist cinema and much more sarcasm toward the protagonists’
motives than Bertolucci would exhibit, Jiang strips the Cultural Revolution of
its ideological veneer. Ma Xiaojun and his friends, the three youngsters in The
Dreamers, and the generations they represent in China and France, blurted
Maoist slogans with great enthusiasm and even conviction, but Maoism was
largely a subterfuge for more mundane passions. One may very well regard Mao
himself as a phantasm that existed only in people’s minds.


Cinephilic and Carnal Passions

   The failure of memory in In the Heat of the Sun is partly due to how the
protagonists construct their lives around fleeting and moving images. Much like
the three youngsters in The Dreamers, Ma Xiaojun and his friends reenact film
scenes as a form of social bonding. Reference to revolutionary films such as Lenin
in 1918 (Lenin v 1918 godu, Mikhail Romm, 1939) and Raid on the White Tiger
Regiment (Qixi baihu tuan, Su Li, 1972) becomes part of their daily lives. The
use of cinematic allusions within the diegesis, invoked by the protagonists and
motivating the plot, may be regarded as a defining trait of post-Maoist cinema.
The tribute to film classics suggests not so much an ideological continuity but a
cinephilic alliance that destabilizes the claim to truth of both past and present.
   As in The Dreamers, the film reenactment scenes in In the Heat of the Sun
are linked to sexual exploration. In conjunction with their cinephilic bonding,
the boys try to impress girls, comment on the girls’ bodies, and tease them into
kissing. The most explicit scene, excised but still implicit in the final cut, shows
Ma Xiaojun masturbating to the photo of a young woman, on her bed, after
he had snuck into her apartment. The photo acquires cinematic attributes as
Ma Xiaojun first views it through a telescope, and it later changes shape in
his memories, from color to black-and-white. By coincidence, photos are also
linked to masturbation in The Dreamers – Matthew places Isabelle’s photo in
his underpants, and Theo ejaculates on Greta Garbo’s image. Such adolescent
behavior is a common cinematic trope; what makes the parallel significant is that

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both films link the cinephilic gaze to sexual initiation and (relatively) explicit
imagery. Cinephilic fetishism leads to loss of sexual innocence, and by extension
to ideological disenchantment. One can only look back at the Maoist period
through a distorting telescope and wonder where things went wrong.
   Post-Maoist cinema has inevitable sexual connotation, as the events of Paris
1968 are associated also with the sexual revolution. In the PRC, filmmakers were
highly aware of the ideological implications of onscreen sexual appeal. At first,
films such as Romance on Lushan Mountain (Lushan lian, Huang Zumo, 1980)
and Old Well (Lao Jing, Wu Tianming, 1987) presented sexually charged scenes
(tame by current standards, but scandalous at the time) as an ideological affront
to Maoist repression. The so-called Fifth Generation of directors that rose to
fame in the 1980s distinguished itself from Maoist cinema by flaunting ‘primitive
passions’.12 Other films, such as in Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (Tianyu, Joan
Chen, 1998), expose cadres’ abuse of political power for sexual harassment. By
the 1990s, films started foregrounding also how sexual exploration continued in
various guises during the Cultural Revolution. Examples include Balzac and the
Little Chinese Seamstress (Xiao caifeng, Dai Sijie, 2002) and Peeping (Feng, aka
Kui, Li Wake, 2003). These films go against the grain of the official line about
the Cultural Revolution simply by recasting Maoist ideology and practice in a
down-to-earth context. As Ma Xiaojun says in In the Heat of the Sun, ‘I never
was this brave or heroic’. The youth stoking the Cultural Revolution were no
glorious activists; they shouted slogans in the streets and masturbated at home.
Acknowledging this unremarkable situation can be highly damaging to the
Communist Party because of the Maoist claim to a revolutionary sublime. Post-
Maoist cinema shows communism not as cowardice, but worse by its terms: as
masturbatory.
   The central role that sex plays in the plot and imagery of The Dreamers
may also be illuminated by the post-Maoist criticism of revolutionary purity.
Bertolucci’s choice of explicit imagery, which in the US won the film the rare NC-
17 rating, may be overdetermined. It may be seen as an auteurist gesture, a return
to the director’s Last Tango in Paris (1972). Both films portray transgressive,
borderline nonconsensual sex. As Asbjørn Grønstad notes, The Dreamers is part
of a brutalist trend that makes the viewer ask, ‘Should I stay or should I go?
If I continue watching, what exactly are my motivations? If I leave, what does
this protest signify, besides discomfort?’.13 The sex in The Dreamers is beautiful
and sensuous, but also disorienting and scarring. As in Bertolucci’s earlier film,
the viewers are kept on edge and must recognize their complicity in ethically
compromised situations.
   At the same time, the homage to Last Tango in Paris highlights the chasm


12
   See Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese
Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
13
   Asbjørn Grønstad, Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-Millennial Art Cinema
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 44.

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                                    Yomi Braester


that has opened since the early 1970s: The Dreamers cannot recreate the shock
caused by Last Tango in Paris since many movies have paved the way in the
meanwhile. The Dreamers is by definition a post-Tango film. By extension, The
Dreamers is perforce post-1960s; it cannot revert to the mindset of the Maoist
period, only mark the growing gap. No one steps in the same ideological river
twice. Moreover, Bertolucci’s film, post-Chinoise and post-Tango, is also a post-
Maoist statement, suggesting not only that there is no return, but that the haloed
point of origin was never all it’s cracked up to be.
   Post-Maoist cinema as I have defined it – films that have established an explicit
rapport with the Maoist period – offer conflicted accounts of that time. The
flagrantly deny the possibility of return to, or even reconstitution of, the 1950s to
1970s. The films provide complex descriptions that counter dogmatic narratives.
La Chinoise, In the Heat of the Sun, and The Dreamers seem to suggest: we may
never have been Maoist. Ideologically and sexually, we may never have been
chaste.




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