This is not a recent movie, it came out in 2003. It has since been buried under the piles of new releases that come out in droves every year, but after watching it again recently, I thought that it never got the recognition it deserved.

It should be known by anyone interested in a film about passion, love, cinema, and seclusion. Its low budget, unknown cast, and controversial subject matter pushed it behind more mainstream movies. This might have been a good thing because I can easily imagine people hanging their mouths open in shock if this movie was to play in their living room.

If you’ve seen a racy little film called Last Tango in Paris, then just think of that with some Flowers in the Attic action thrown in the mix. Sexual liberation encased in a story about emotional connection. Italian-born director Bernardo Bertolucci, who also made Last Tango in Paris, shows love in its rawest, most painful and beautiful form. I must warn that this is not for the bashful mind. Anyone afraid of full frontal nudity must avoid this movie because Bertolucci doesn’t shy away from graphic sexual content.

Underrated actors, Eva Green and Louis Garrel, play fraternal French twins sharing one soul, and indie actor Michael Pitt, known for playing oddball roles, is the kind-hearted American who befriends them. The three become close within a matter of hours and it’s only a day later when the twins offer their friend to move in with them. The three form an erotic triangle which blurs the lines of love and lust as Pitt’s character quickly embraces their union and begins a sexual affair with the sister and an intellectual affair with the brother; a three-way relationship built on pure intimacy and intellectual debates.

The twins are inappropriately close. As they later admit, they don’t see each other as two people but as one person and therefore don’t see anything strange about their relationship. They are innocently unaware of how disturbing it is, while also being conscious of how it wouldn’t be accepted.

However, the true story in The Dreamers is isolation, a separation from the world created by an unwillingness to engage in what’s real and cling to the familiar. The three teenagers are film buffs, living and breathing the cinema. But, for the twins it is much more extreme when they refuse to separate real life from movie life, initially stunting their mental growth.

Set during the ongoing Vietnam war and the 1968 Paris student riots, the start of the film hosts a scene involving their father. He explains that marching through the streets of Paris in protest waving petitions won’t change the world. He looks at his children and says “Before you can change the world, you must realize that you, yourself, are part of it. You can’t stand outside looking in.” If there is a single line that sums up this film, this is it. Once their relationship starts, the three never leave the apartment, choosing to live in their own world. At one point, they do leave and they find the city ransacked from the riots happening right outside their door to which they had purposely remained ignorant.

Two lost souls stuck within a Peter Pan complex fall in love with their very own Wendy. She hopes to pull them from their comfortable world where nothing changes into a living one, but it’s harder than expected. It’s a tale to which almost everyone can relate.

Louis Garrel excellently portrays the angry youth desperate to change the world. Eva Green is majestic as usual, stealing every scene she is in. And Michael Pitt shines as an innocent stranger falling into the arms of two wild flames.

Sensitive, passionate and intelligent, watching The Dreamers is like watching a surreal Paris portrait come to life, a truly artistic film. Drink expensive wine and watch this criminally underrated film, preferably with your significant other. But not for a first date, dear God, not for a first date. Again, if full frontal makes you uncomfortable, male or female, or if the nature of the three’s relationship upsets you, then don’t watch, but otherwise, give it a try. For bookworms, the film is based on the novel, The Holy Innocents by Gilbert Adair, that has since been renamed in newer prints to match the title of the movie.