Théo and Isabelle are intense French siblings living in Paris in 1968. They're fanatics for the cinema, and when their parents go away for the summer they invite Matthew, a fellow cinephile, an American studying in Paris, to live with them in their parents' labyrinthine flat. They've just met him, but he takes them up on their offer, and for most of the movie the three of them stay cooped up in this dark space talking about movies, music, and politics, but mostly movies and mostly naked.

The Dreamers opens with vibrant invocations of the figures of the French New Wave, such as Henri Langlois, the legendary curator of the Cinémathèque Française, and the filmmakers and film lovers that his archive inspired. The movie frequently dips into those archives to re-stage moments from the canon, merging its action with clips from classic movies and nodding to pillars like Band à Part explicitly and Jules and Jim implicitly with its trio of pals.

Unfortunately, the movie never uses these allusions as anything other than shallow points of reference — except for maybe a brief discussion of Keaton and Chaplin, which at least provides a critical consensus of the two filmmakers as they're compared today if not then — and the same is true of the political discord erupting outside the apartment. "There's something going on out there, and it seems like it might be important," says Matthew to Théo, lecturing him for not getting involved. The irony is that he himself isn't involved. He and his new friend argue about their particular ways of opposing the Vietnam war (a practical pacifist vs. a militant) while they're crammed into a bathtub, shortly joined by Isabelle who doesn't weigh in on the subject but merely gets sudsy. They debate the guitar gods, Hendrix vs. Clapton, but when Bertolucci cranks up the soundtrack to evoke the period, it's not Hendrix performing "Hey Joe" but Matthew himself, or someone who sounds like him. And the cinema debates usually take the form of pop quizzes that the three friends-slash-siblings give each other; incorrect answers are implausibly punished by some form of sexual humiliation, a plot device that's useful for getting people out of their clothes.

I suppose this is Bertolucci's point, that navel-gazing is both at odds with activism and somehow inseparable from it — or seems so to someone looking back at these turbulent days in 1968 — a paradox that's depicted here by characters who gaze at their bath mates' navels instead of their own. But the ideas are so vaguely explored and so subservient to well-lit flesh that the political unrest outside the apartment, which appears in a flash and disappears as quickly, feels like window dressing for a movie more interested in bleeding the idea of youth from scattered memories — not the reality of youth, but the fantastic dreams of adults who get to reflect wistfully on the protests in the streets, the apartments in Paris, the university classes (rarely attended, always offscreen), the absent parents, and the bodies intertwined without having to consider for a moment the ramifications or failed achievements of any of it. In the same way that Bertolucci culls clips from old movies, he touches on the supposed high points of a moment in history and suggests that dwelling on these superficialities is naive, even though that's all he seems interested in doing himself.

As someone who wasn't in Paris in 1968 — who wasn't anywhere, in fact — I get a real kick out of the pictures of streets crammed with people who are furious about cinema and furious about the war, inseparable passions, even though most of the pictures are recreations. I've been on those Cinémathèque steps. Alas, there was no lovely French girl chained to the gate at the bottom, nor were rubber bullets fired at me, and the only tear gas I ever smelled was an accident, not meant for me. Wrong place, wrong time. And though I can enjoy some of that energy vicariously through Bertolucci's movie, it's finally a hollow experience, an unreachable destination, with an importance not articulated, barely even explored, by a movie that's decadently gorgeous.