"I don't believe in God, but if I did, he would be a black, left-handed guitarist." A young American studying in Paris in 1968 strikes up a friendship with a French brother and sister. Set against the background of the '68 Paris student riots.

REVIEW For most of its run time, "The Dreamers" is a stunningly beautiful and effectively seductive tale of three youths (one American, two French) who intermingle in a love affair sparked by their love of movies. As tales of foreign dislocation go, this runs circles around "Lost in Translation," and ups the erotic ante to a place so casual that some mentalities may be downright uncomfortable with the lack of sensationalism present. In what is essentially a scaled-down variation on Truffaut's "Jules and Jim," director Bernardo Bertolucci places American student Matthew (Michael Pitt, full of marquee-icon beauty) in Paris, where he meets up with Isabelle (the luscious Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel), whose ambiguous relationship runs the gamut from siblings to twins to lovers; the trio become enmeshed in a love triangle that extends for a month, in the midst of the escalation of military operations in Vietnam and a Communist uprising in France. Bertolucci opens with images of outcry against a blacklisted filmmaker, and concludes with a less-than-convincing paralleling of political protest (the axiom that "all art is political" given an overly literal connotation). The at-times distracting political aspect, however, is a minor complaint in what is, at heart, a hypnotically engaging account of three mysterious teens in the midst of their sexual awakening. "The Dreamers" is, as another critic has already stated, a wonderful valentine to love--and to cinema itself.