Phil is the opposite, a naughty boy using his photography as a pretext for getting women naked. She is the physical embodiment of everything he’s fallen in love with onscreen. Terry is inexperienced and shy, expressing his love for Catherine by writing a script about how they met. Her name is Catherine (Jane Levy), the same as Jeanne Moreau’s character in “Jules and Jim.” Soon Terry wins Catherine’s heart but Phil, initially supportive of his friend’s quest, won’t let Terry have Catherine all to himself.įranco, working from a script by Josh Boone (“The Fault in Our Stars”), sets up the possibility of a love triangle filled with gamesmanship and heartache. When Terry sees her outside the same theater some days later, he makes his move. Resembling a less pouty Michael Pitt, who played Matthew in “The Dreamers,” Jack Kilmer is Terry Lamm (his last name a clue to his temperament), a sensitive Baltimore transplant studying film in New York in 1979 and first seen at a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Une femme est une femme.” Afterward, his unsuccessful attempt to pick up a beautiful actress outside the theater is noticed by fellow student Phil (Shameik Moore), a swaggering photographer who offers to help Terry track her down. Residual goodwill from Franco’s last relatively high-profile directing effort, 2017’s delightfully odd “The Disaster Artist,” should help North American distributor Cleopatra Entertainment reel in a smattering of curious moviegoers after which it’s off to VOD.
It’s skillful enough to tickle the mind and the emotions but not effective enough to fully engage them. But while the film’s sense of experimentation carries a fair amount of intrigue, it traps its central threesome in an Easter egg-filled intellectual exercise punctuated by melodramatic strokes. Moving the action to 1980s New York adds an urban-contemporary feel and an identifiable environment for events to unfold.
So it’s fitting that his peripatetic career has led him to direct “Pretenders,” essentially a remake of “The Dreamers,” that combines Bertolucci’s decadent appreciation of New Wave cool with the love triangle from François Truffaut’s 1962 touchstone, “Jules and Jim.” At the beginning of Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers,” his 2003 tribute to the French New Wave, Matthew, the naïve American studying in Paris, refers to true lovers of cinema as “the insatiables.” James Franco, with his 150 acting credits, 39 directing credits, 25 writing credits, and single credit as “boom operator,” is one of the industry’s most insatiable insatiables.
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