Bertolucci film escapes cuts, but gets NC-17 rating

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

By ANTHONY BREZNICAN
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Bernardo Bertolucci will not have to cut his new erotic drama "The Dreamers" to get it distributed in the United States.

Fox Searchlight Pictures said yesterday it will release the director's original version on Feb. 6 with an NC-17 designation instead of demanding an R-rated version. It could open in Seattle a week later.

It's rare for an NC-17 film to get a U.S. theatrical release. The makers of some sexually explicit dramas -- such as 2001's "The Center of the World" -- choose to go into distribution with no rating at all rather than accept the NC-17 mark.

Only a handful of films since 1997 have gone with the rating -- including "Bent," a drama about Nazi persecution of homosexuals; the porn comedy "Orgazmo"; and "L.I.E.," about a boy who becomes the focus of a pedophile.

Bertolucci has publicly worried about the film's fate in America. "The film risks coming out in the United States amputated and mutilated," the Italian director said last fall. "Perhaps someone thinks that the U.S. public is too immature to see this."

But Fox Searchlight decided against any cuts.

"I'm relieved -- in so many ways -- that the distributor has had the vision to release my original film," Bertolucci said yesterday. "After all, an orgasm is better than a bomb."

"The Dreamers" tells the story, set in 1968, of a young American student (Michael Pitt) who moves in with a Parisian brother and sister (Louis Garrel and Eva Green) whose wild lifestyle changes him. The movie includes full frontal male nudity.

" 'The Dreamers' provocatively explores human sexuality in a frank way," said Fox Searchlight Pictures president Peter Rice, who compared the film to the Dustin Hoffman-Jon Voight drama "Midnight Cowboy" and Bertolucci's own "Last Tango in Paris."

"Like 'The Dreamers,' those masterpieces would not have been improved by cutting them to an R rating," Rice said.

The specialty division of 20th Century Fox studios found itself in a difficult position after acquiring the film, which screened at the 2003 Venice Film Festival and London Film Festival.

Most NC-17 rated films have difficulty finding theaters and securing advertising in the United States. Many mainstream cinemas and media companies equate the NC-17 rating to pornography -- even though it was created to differentiate adult-only dramatic filmmaking from skin flicks. But cutting the movie's content to get an R rating likely would enrage cinephiles who would be the film's target audience.

Bertolucci, whose 1986 film "The Last Emperor" won nine Academy Awards -- including best picture and director -- has faced controversy before over sexually charged films. His 1972 work "Last Tango in Paris" initially had distribution trouble and ended up a critical success.