Taglines: Revolution just beginning.
During the 1970s a student named Gilles gets entangled in contemporary political turmoils although he would rather just be a creative artist. While torn between his solidarity to his friends and his personal ambitions he falls in love with Christine.
Olivier Assayas’ semi-autobiographical new feature Something in the Air is a vibrant, incisively crafted story of a young man’s artistic awakening in the politically turbulent French student movement of the early ‘70s. In a nod to his earlier film Cold Water, Assayas’ surrogate Gilles (newcomer Clément Métayer) is a graduating high school student in Paris deeply involved in the counterculture of the time.
While Gilles begins to realize that his interests lie more in the revolutions in music and art, he finds himself pulled into ever more dangerous political protests by the people around him, especially his radicalized girlfriend. Illuminating and elegiac, Assayas’ story celebrates that thrilling, evanescent moment in history when young people could feel revolution just within their grasp.
Something in the Air (French: Après mai) is a French drama film written and directed by Olivier Assayas. The film was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 69th Venice International Film Festival. Assayas won the Osella for Best Screenplay.
Review for Something in the Air
In contemporary French and European cinema, the events of May 1968 live stubbornly on – intensely debated and treasured and re-mythologised. A whiff of tear gas is a madeleine. For wasn’t it cinema itself, and the attempted sacking of the Cinématheque Française chief Henri Langlois, that helped spark the Paris uprising? Philippe Garrel’s Les Amants Réguliers, or Regular Lovers (2005), showed a young poet, played by the director’s son Louis, taking to the barricades in 1968. Louis Garrel played something similar in Bernardo Bertolucci’s soixante-huitard swoon, The Dreamers (2003). Before that, Louis Malle’s Milou En Mai, or May Fools (1990) starred Michel Piccoli as the provincial Milou, whose family estate in May 1968 is on the verge of being dismembered by history itself.
Olivier Assayas’s Après Mai, or After May, is in this tradition. It is released here under the title Something in the Air, and indeed there is: a concrete block heading for the skull of a security guard. Of this, more in a moment. The action takes place in 1971 when the revolutionary spirit is still present, but beginning to be coloured by lassitude, anger, violence and a nagging sense that livings have to be earned and careers built.
This is a great-looking movie with a sure sense of time and place; it is obviously a personal, and in fact, autobiographical work about Assayas’s own youth. But for all its flair, I came away dissatisfied at its colossal self-indulgence and creamy complacency, and the way historical perspective and meaning are permitted to dissolve in its sunlit nostalgia. Its sense of revolutionary politics is very different from the hard, fierce drama of Assayas’s epic Carlos, about the international terrorist.
Clément Métayer is Gilles, a politicised kid in high school and would-be artist who is angrily participating in the radical spirit of the times: he is the lover of Laure (Carole Combes), but the relationship is disintegrating because she is leaving for England, and Gilles is increasingly drawn to the beautiful Christine (Lola Créton). In the cause of consciousness-raising, Gilles and his comrades crank out agitprop zines on mimeograph machines and creep into the school at night to cover the walls with graffiti – the kind of graffiti that in 2013 has been reportedly wiped out by social media and Web 2.0. But it isn’t simply that: a concrete block is pushed over a walkway handrail, hitting a security guard below, putting him into a coma, and this serious act of violence – the one moment at which, in fact, the whole idea of violence is brought to a head – means Gilles has to leave town. He heads south to Italy and finds that the further south he goes, the more lenient and hedonistic the revolutionary spirit becomes, very different from the arguments and smoke-filled rooms of Paris.
A good deal happens to Gilles and his contemporaries during the movie: experimental films about the workers’ revolution in south-east Asia and South America are shown and excitably discussed, a lot of good-looking young people have sex, and there is a tragedy. But that injured security guard does not figure greatly – until a fraught encounter near the end – and it is not easy to tell if anyone’s minds have been changed about what happened to this poor man. Gilles does not appear particularly penitent, or guilty, yet neither is he specifically defiant on the subject of necessary violence: when the subject arises, Gilles’s attitude is one of tense self-pity.
Something in the Air
Directed by: Olivier Assayas
Starring: Clément Métayer, Lola Créton, Felix Armand, Carole Combes, India Menuez, Dolores Chaplin
Screenplay by: Olivier Assayas
Production Design by: François-Renaud Labarthe, Paki Meduri
Cinematography by: Eric Gautier
Film Editing by: Luc Barnier
Costume Design by: Jürgen Doering
Set Decoration by: Dorota Okulicz
MPAA Rating: None.
Studio: France 3 Cinéma
Release Date: May 3, 2013
Visits: 73
