Bertolucci himself is certainly of two minds, if you want my impression. This tug-of-war issue, for me, is what defines THE DREAMERS, which is easily one of the most brazenly sexual and free-spirited films to come along in a long while. But then an artfully perverse attention to sensual matters is nothing new for this legendary Italian artist.

Several Bertolucci films over the past 35 years or so (excluding LAST TANGO IN PARIS and maybe one or two others) have looked at social turbulence and worn political concerns on their sleeves, but every last one has been a feast for the senses -- latherings of sexuality and eroticism, exquisite wardrobes and production design, beautiful actors and actresses, elegant photography that oozes texture and flavor.

The sexually explorative adventure enjoyed by Pitt, Green and Garel isn't exactly a three-way deal as there's no overtly gay activity between the guys, but what they do together is the next closest thing. Pitt and Green have breathtaking sex, one masturbates in front of the other two, and they all stroll around naked and wind up sharing just about every intimate thought and urge that comes to mind.

And all through it are the movie references - acting-out games in which the characters test each other's knowledge of this or that classic film, and clips from several of these classics that echo their fantasies and obsessions, as well as news of the firing of Henri Langlois, the beloved, free-spirited head of the Cinematheque Francais, and the angry protests by film lovers that followed.

And it's all great, great stuff. You can smell and taste so much in this film; it makes you feel alive and tingly with your pores wide open, like you'd feel after being expertly massaged for two hours plus. (130 minutes, to be exact.)

It's not a horn-dog ride at all, although Green's nude scenes are fantastic. It's an erotic banquet movie -- sometimes graphic, sometime subtle and tantalizing. It has great fucking, good food, superb wine, nicely chosen '60s music tracks (I haven't heard The Doors' "The Spy" in ages), and a brief closeup of Michael Pitt's love muscle.

I can see women enjoying this film as much as guys, and perhaps more so. It's a date movie for anyone who's been around the track a couple of times, and assembled any kind of erotic history.

Fox Searchlight recently decided to release the original NC-17 version instead of proceeding with their earlier decision, which distressed and angered Bertolucci and his producer, Jeremy Thomas, to trim two or three minutes in order to get an R rating. A pat on the back for Peter Rice and the F.S. gang for showing some maturity and backbone on this matter.

Interlude

The Fox Searchlighters invited several journalists to a DREAMERS dinner prior to last night's screening at 350 Main Street. It was an elegant affair all around; excellent food was served. I sat next to New York critics Andrew Johnston and Lou Lumenick. Thomas sat at our table next to NEW YORK magazine columnist Anne Thompson. NEW YORK TIMES reporter Sharon Waxman spent the whole time talking to Rice, who was seated directly across from her.

I spoke with Michael Pitt for a brief period before we sat down. I told him I'm fairly friendly with director Barbet Schroeder, who directed Pitt in MURDER BY NUMBERS. He said he believed that Schroeder, who "knows Bernardo really well," may have been instrumental in persuading Bertolucci to use him for THE DREAMERS.

I snapped a shot of an unusual olive-drab T-shirt Pitt was wearing. On the front of it he had hand-written a quote from Bertolucci that was first spoken during the ratings dispute: "An orgasm is better than a bomb."

On The Road

I movie-watched, wrote and partied for 20 hours straight on Monday, and it was generally time rapturously well-spent. Four superb films, three parties. You can burn-out very quickly at this rate, of course. You have to pace yourself, and drink lots of water. Water is the key.

As for the quiet moments, the transcendence, the gazing at snow-covered hilltops while sipping herbal tea....well, that's a matter of mystical serendipity. I had a God moment this morning as I was walking back from the Victorian Village laundry room. A couple of minutes' exposure to cold, moist mountain air when you're insufficiently dressed can do refreshing things for the soul.

The most rewarding Monday activity of all was seeing Walter Salles' gloriously picturesque and gently compassionate road movie, THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES.

The person who told me otherwise -- I quoted him anonymously in a Sundance preview column a while back -- was wrong, wrong, wrong, and I apologize to Salles and everyone else involved for passing this along.

A true story, DIARIES is about an eight-month, hand-to-mouth journey in 1952 taken throughout South America by a couple of upper-middle-class Argentine medical students. The echoes stem from the fact that one of them was 23 year-old Ernesto "Che" Guevara (skillfully played by Gale Garcia Bernal), who became the most famous and idealized Latin American revolutionary of the 20th Century.

Based on recollections by Guevara and buddy Alberto Granado, who's still alive and appears as himself at the film's conclusion, DIARIES is about the birth of Guevara's social conscience. The trip was the beginning of Che's voyage from being a nearly-graduated middle-class doctor with boyish features into a bearded, cigar-smoking, gun-toting fighter of imperialism, one who was ultimately shot to death by Bolivian soldiers in October of 1967.

But the film also works as a story about any semi-privileged young man's first taste of social inequity and oligarch oppression. It's about letting life in, waking up, and finding your heart.

There's some murk in this, of course. How does the saying go? If you're not some kind of social revolutionary in your early 20s, you have no heart, but if you haven't grown past this by the time you're 30 or so, you have no brains.

Guevara's continuing legend -- his celebrity, really -- is due to the fact that he never "got smart," and in fact died for this refusal at age 39. DIARIES gets you thinking not just about the size of his heart, but what his life really amounted to. The film never addresses the ultimate fruit of his triumph alongside Fidel Castro as a leader of the Cuban revolution, the long-term value of which has always been ambiguous, to put it daintily.

It is interesting to note, for instance, that the Cuban government didn't allow for the publication of Guevara's " Motorcycle Diaries" book until 1995, apparently because the bureaucrats thought Guevara's women-chasing and food-mooching during the trip represented 'bourgeois concerns' and would therefore undermine...what, the country's revolutionary spirit? What a steaming pile.

A 1997 NEWSWEEK piece about Guevara asked why people are so taken with his story, since "it can't be based wholly on his record. Here is a guy, for all his virtues, who failed in all but one of his revolutionary adventures. He directly participated in dozens of executions after the 1959 rebel triumph in Cuba and, in the 1962 missile crisis, was a radical voice pushing for a nuclear confrontation.

"Guevara's allure seems to stem, rather, from a nostalgic longing for the pure, uncompromising ideals of the past," the article observed. "'In a world of ferocious competition and consumerism, some element of humanity is still looking for a hero with values,' says Orlando Borrego, one of Che's closest confidants during the early years of the revolution. 'In Che, they have a paradigm: a man who was absolutely honest, completely selfless, constantly perfecting his personality.'"

DIARIES isn't a heavy-handed political tract -- a lot of it is just about the raucousness of being young and game and hungry for adventure. There's a lot of hound-dogging and misfortunes and stuff that feels borrowed from Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. But the more suffering Guevara sees, the more he absorbs the heartless attitude of South America's have's towards the have-not's, the more the film's soul comes into view.

And yet Salles is first and foremost a cinematic naturalist. As VARIETY's Todd McCarthy wrote Monday, DIARIES is "artful but not arty, political without being didactic."

It is also likely to be a nominee for Best Foreign Film by this time next year. I can't imagine it not being on my Best of '04 list -- it's a beautifully rendered thing in every sense of the term. Bernal and costar Rodrigo de la Serna are wonderful to hang with, and everyone and everything else they encounter during this 126-minute road film are part of a rich and robust symphony.

Focus Features bought distrib rights to Salles' film just after last Saturday's debut screening at the Eccles. I'm hearing they'll be releasing it sometime in the fourth quarter.

Woman of Quality

Joshua Marton's MARIA FULL OF GRACE, another film rooted in South American conditions, was my second favorite Monday film. I owe a debt to MPRM's Michael Lawson for urging me to see it, as I was leaning toward putting it off. My occasional short-sightedness can be grating at times.

Tautly constructed, believably acted in a low-key vein, and completely fat-free, MARIA FULL OF GRACE is another high-quality drama from HBO Films in the vein of ELEPHANT, REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES and AMERICAN SPLENDOR. Fine Line will distribute to theatres, and I hope they don't mess it up. Good and gripping as it is, MARIA is the kind of film -- quiet, character-driven, Spanish-speaking -- that needs all the inspired indie-distributor help it can get.

The Sundance program notes made MARIA sound like a woman's drama, and it is this, for the most part, but the part that really got me was the drug-smuggling section in the second act, which generates strong suspense. This portion in itself easily ranks alongside the realism and verisimilitude in Steven Soderbergh's TRAFFIC.

The story's about an independent-minded 17-year-old girl -- a beauty -- from rural Colombia (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who takes a gig as a drug mule in order to escape a dead-end, low-income life. Being a mule involves swallowing 60 or so sealed pellets of cocaine just before flying off to an American city (New York in this case), and then crapping them out when she arrives. For this she gets $5000, minus expenses.

I can't write much longer this morning (it's time to get to a screening), but MARIA shifts into high gear when Maria embarks on her maiden voyage. On the same trip is Lucy (Giulied Lopez), an experienced mule whom Maria has befriended. Things get tense, and then tenser, and then tragedy steps in, and then more stuff happens. Let's just say Marston has written a very good script, and has gotten superb performances out of each and every player, Moreno in particular.

Duhhh...

The hero of Stacey Peralta's RIDING GIANTS is Laird Hamilton, not Laird Armstrong, as I called him in Monday's column. My head sometimes gets side-tracked when I'm racing through the writing of a column, and dumb things come out on the page.

Out of Time

I can't get into it today, but Matt Mahurin's I LIKE KILLING FLIES, which was profiled by Elvis Mitchell in Tuesday's NEW YORK TIMES, is a rich and vibrant documentary about a real New York character -- West Village resturateur Kenny Shopsin, who's been cooking, philosophizing and throwing the wrong kind of customers out of his place for years.

Kenny's description of himself at one point as "a big fat angry Jew" made me nostalgic for New York City. I haven't run into many fat, angry, mouthy Jews in Los Angeles, and I haven't been thrown out of a restaurant for ordering the wrong food or arriving with a party of six in a long time.

I hate namby-pamby, "we're-sorry-sir" operations like the Grub Steak, but Shopsin's is my kind of greasy spoon, and Shopsin can tell me to go stuff it any time. I'll try and get into the film a bit more in Friday's column.

Nip & Tuck

I'm being told that Jessica Sharzer's SPEAK, which showed at the Prospector Square theatre on Tuesday afternoon, is the latest must-see. It's about a high-school girl who suffers through rape and then doesn't say anything about it, with the residue building and building. Sharzer is "as good as any studio-recognized director out there," I was told last night by Movie City News' editor David Poland, who added "she may be the next big woman director."

I spoke to a buyer for Century Cinemas at a dinner on Monday night who said he didn't much care for Mel Gibson's THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST....although he believes it'll do great business. He said it's all brutality (beatings, bloodletting, torture on the cross) and not enough poetry or sunlight steaming through clouds. It doesn't end all that well either, he says. (Stone rolled aside, Jesus resurrected, fade to black.) He said he doesn't think the big-gun critics are going to get on board. He believes it'll primarily play to middle-American Christian types.

Diet Coke with Lime, which was being handed out free on Park City's Main Street earlier this week, tastes synthetic and metallic. It tastes like two or three fake limes have been squeezed into a Diet Coke. That said, it's not awful...I mean, it's thirst-quenching and all and it doesn't make you retch, but I prefer Diet Coke with Lemon, which the Coca Cola company has been phasing out in supermarkets.

Some of the acquisition talk I've been hearing is mystifying. Well-directed and well-acted as Nicole Kassell's THE WOODSMAN may be, the notion that it's been "in heavy play" - i.e., being bid upon by ardent suitors -- sound inflated. It's about a male child molester (expertly played with just the right touches of hesitancy and guilt by Kevin Bacon) just out of jail who's struggling not to give in to the urges that got him in trouble in the first place. It's a good, grim drama and deserving of respect, but c'mon...nobody in the real world is going to be all that keen to see this, except for a certain portion off the review-reading elite. Take the needle out of your arm. The best performance after Bacon's, by the way, is by rapper Mos Def, who plays a soft-spoken detective.

Same deal with John Curran's WE DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE, a depressing look at intimacy problems afflicting two married couples, infidelity being the most prominent. It's an admirably honest work with strong performances, and buttressed by a first-rate script by Larry Gross. But the characters are all glum-heads, and it hits you after a while that these people (played by Laura Dern, Mark Ruffalo, SIX FEET UNDER's Peter Krause, and Naomi Watts) would probably be unhappy even if all the problems they're dealing with in the film were magically solved. They'd just switch over to new ones. They're not turn-on types, and I didn't care about them. To say that bidding action on this film is "humming" is...well, good for Curran and Gross and everyone else, but whoever releases this puppy is going to suck it.

People vs. Grub Steak

"My one and only experience at [Park City's] Grub Steak restaurant was much like yours: Awful. No, beyond awful in terms of rudeness and bullshit. Horrendous. I've patronized the top joints of New York City, Los Angeles, Paris and London, and I'll take my expected lumps as a non-celeb/non-billionaire patron, but man, they really put me off my feed at Grub Steak. Hey, I'll betcha Redford could get a salad at the bar. Yeah? Yeah. Sod the fucking lot of 'em." -- Josh Mooney.

Mann Numbers

I'm now hearing slightly different information regarding the Michael Mann/COLLATERAL Word item at the top right area of the column. "Michael shoots a lot...no big deal," a DreamWorks publicist says. "For THE INSIDER, he shot 900,000 feet of film. For LAST OF THE MOHICANS, over l million feet of film. 1.5 million for ali. He has shot 878,000 feet combined (600,000 video, 278,000 film) for COLLATERAL."