Après mai
**½/****
written and directed by Olivier Assayas
by Angelo Muredda Those who see Olivier Assayas’s new film
stateside will be met with an ambivalent gesture right from the title card,
which juxtaposes the Godardian red and blue of the French title, “APRES
MAI” (“After May”), with the mousy English translation,
“Something in the Air.” The French is the more precise, referring to
the dispirited state of radicals following the events of May, 1968, while
Thunderclap Newman’s yearning anthem about armed insurrection evokes only a
roughly simpatico version of late-’60s American idealism falling into ’70s
cynicism. Vague as the English title reads by comparison, though, it turns out
to be the more fitting of the two. Indeed, for all of Assayas’s personal
attachment to this material, Something in the Air isn’t significantly more illuminating
about the period than something like Almost
Famous, which uses the titular song to roughly the same effect, evincing
the same impossible nostalgia for a time when everyone was supposedly moving
together on one big bus, so to speak.
A semi-autobiographical portrait of
leftist high-school seniors “not far from Paris” circa 1971, Assayas’s current film recalls his Cold
Water down to the
recycled names of that 1994 film’s protagonists. Like Assayas as a teen, Gilles
2.0 (Clement Metayer) is a painter and aspiring director, a Marxist in spirit
but an aesthete in practice, while girlfriend Christine 2.0 (Lola Créton) is
all-in, eventually taking up with a Trotskyite Italian film collective that
produces banal documentaries about workers’ rights. (Avant-garde filmmaking,
one ideologue cautions a skeptical Gilles, is the true expression of bourgeois privilege.)
With Gilles and Christine as pivot points, Assayas lets the movie splinter off
wherever the rest of the cast of characters fall politically and
intellectually. The most attention is reserved for a pair of free-loving
idealists done in by an unwanted pregnancy (an odd, borderline moralizing
digression), and Gilles’s wispy ex, a doped-up bohemian who throws lavish
country-house parties–those being one of Assayas’s favourite things to shoot,
as Summer Hours‘ beautiful closing moments showed.
By design, there isn’t a clear ideological
program in this rearview glance at the past, with the long exchanges between
Gilles and whoever is sitting across from him at any moment–about the utilitarian
function of art and so on–feeling more like the characters’ arrogant
undergraduate insights than Assayas’s own ideas. (Note the deathly earnest
roundtable in the library, where a dissident writer for the student paper–who’s
probably a banker these days–tells his comrades to “use summer vacation
to lie low.”) It’s refreshing to be allowed to think about what came after
May as a shambling, many-headed beast directed by soapboxing youngsters rather
than a coherent revolutionary platform designed and steered by adults. Yet beyond
a certain point, Assayas’s detached reportage of this uneasy collective begins
to feel rudderless instead of complex, as youth factions are increasingly
defined through visual shorthand: the books they tote around; the style of
their paintings; the cut of their jeans. That recreation of the texture of the
period is more nuanced than the comparable efforts of Forrest Gump,
to be sure, but it’s ultimately the same method in the hands of a less
sentimental filmmaker. Programme:
Masters
