DVD Après mai
Run time: 122 min
Rating: 6.5
Genres: Drama
Director: Olivier Assayas
Writers: Olivier Assayas
Stars: Clément Métayer, André Marcon, Lola Créton
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Storyline In the months after the heady weeks of May ’68, a group of young Europeans search for a way to continue the revolution believed to be just beginning. |
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Plot Keywords: cigarette smoking, italy, florence italy, poster, graffiti | |
Details: Country: France Release Date: 24 May 2013 (UK) |
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Box Office Opening Weekend: $13,288 (USA) (3 May 2013) Gross: $71,921 (USA) (31 May 2013) |
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DVD Après mai
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In 1968 in Paris, France, the something in the air was revolution. In March of that year, a single spark began a revolt when a small group of students at Nanterre University took to the streets to protest conditions at the University. By July, workers had shut down Paris with a general strike in which ten million workers took part, occupying factories and marching in solidarity with students, who occupied the Sorbonne. The objectives were self-management by workers, a decentralization of economic and political power and participatory democracy in the factories and universities. By the end of July, the government of the autocratic Charles de Gaulle was teetering on the brink of collapse.
The impact of the 1968 near revolution is still being felt three years later in February, 1971 when Olivier Assayas' semi-autobiographical Something in the Air opens. A demonstration is held at the Place de Clichy in Paris as a teacher in a high school class reads a passage from Pascal, "Between us and Heaven or Hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world." At the same time, the brutal police repression of a young protester, Richard Deshayes, takes place in nearby streets demonstrating the immediacy of Pascal's words. Deshaves loses an eye after being hit in the face by a smoke grenade, and the poster of his bloody head is shown as a symbol of resistance throughout the film.
Something in the Air is about coming-of-age and the awakening of conscience, and Assayas has the courage to remind us of the need to align our actions in life with our beliefs and conscience. Events are shown from the perspective of Gilles (Clément Métayer), a 17-year-old high school student who is a prospective filmmaker, painter of considerable talent as well as a political activist. Gilles and his friends Alain (Felix Armand) and Jean-Pierre (Hugo Conzelmann) are activists in the political arena, working to create a better society. They distribute leaflets, contribute articles to left-wing magazines, and spray paint graffiti slogans on the walls. After a security guard is seriously injured by a Molotov cocktail thrown by one of the protesters, however, Gilles and his new girlfriend Christine (Lola Creton) leave the country for Italy.
On the trip with a group of activist filmmakers, Gilles is told that he can only borrow a camera only if he does agitprop because "we don't do fiction." At a showing of a revolutionary film, a discussion follows about whether to use conventional style or "revolutionary syntax" to get their message across. Although the film is about ideas, we never know exactly which of the student activists are Anarchists, Trotskyites, Maoists, Marxists, Stalinists, or democratic Socialists, but it hardly seems to matter. What makes the film so unique is not only a script that is highly literate but its portrayal of young people with respect for their minds and an appreciation of their dignity and commitment, attributes normally not seen in films about the counterculture. Author Anne Morris said, "The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating in work, in play, in love."
Assayas correctly notes that, in addition to advocating political and economic change, the protesters also want to change outmoded social conventions, particularly the stranglehold of the scientific/materialist paradigm and the puritan sexual mores that place barriers on spiritual growth and full self-expression. What comes across as special, even more than ideas about filmmaking or political theory, are the relationships they have with each other that express their openness and love. The film also blends idealism with music in a way that the songs of Syd Barrett-era, Booker T & the MG's, Nick Drake, and an inspiring rendition of a Phil Ochs song by Johnny Flynn feel organic to the scenes in which they are used.
When the students ultimately gain a sense that life is governed by practicality as well as idealism, they gradually drift away to parents, jobs, school and the careers that will shape their lives, but they have already made a difference. Though their immediate objectives were only partially met, later in the year, uprisings began in Poland and Czechoslovakia that would have a profound effect on the Soviet system, protesters marched at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, rioted at Kent State, and the brutal war against a small, peasant country came to an end several years later.
Though the film is more about personal goals and ambitions than revolution and Assayas does not shed much light on the causes that the students fought for, no film in recent memory has presented such an authentic view of the immediacy of the period as Something in the Air. The feeling of change is electric and its mood is brilliantly reflected by the film's lack of cynicism and condescension. Assayas brings us back to a time when everything seemed possible and people were truly young because the world, maybe for the first time, began to dream of what it would be like to be young with them.
I don't have a lot to say about 'Something in the Air', mainly because it doesn't seem to have a coherent plot – perhaps appropriately, given that it's about a bunch of anarchists. A group of French teenagers in the 1970s sit around in smoke-filled rooms thinking too much, occasionally carrying out acts of violence in the anarchist 'cause'. As time passes some remain committed to the cause, while others, though still professing belief, find their personal lives and ambitions eclipsing their anarchy. If you're in the right mood for this type of film it certainly hits the spot, and there's a very amusing scene where one of the young men gets a job at Pinewood Studios in the UK and finds himself working on a film involving Nazis, sea-monsters and a scantily-clad cavegirl – a far cry from the experimental (read: commercially unviable) cinema to which he'd rather devote his time. Welcome to real life, mate!
The filmmaker clearly lived through this period at about the same age as the characters, so I don't understand why the film is both slow and superficial. The (post) Sixties here is fight the police, shout slogans at a meeting, publish a newspaper, sit in a cafe, do some art, read a book about Mao, meet a girl in the woods and take her clothes off, recite poetry out loud, vandalize your school, have another meeting, go to Italy to meet foreign girls, take their clothes off, make radical films, etc. etc. Except no one is having any fun. Not a single person in this film enjoys anything ever about their free and mobile lives-where unlike now people like them age 20 all seem to have plenty of money. No one even smiles when the see a friend they haven't seen in months — it's the French parodying the French. I won' to bore you with the reactionary representations of political philosophy, drugs, eastern mysticism, or union politics, all of which are brainlessly dismissed as pointless. The core characters drift as though to be post 1968 meant you lived under a shadow. some kind of paralysis. The exposition of character is weak and many plot threads are just dead ends. Our hero keeps shuffling forward, perhaps as a tribute to a film industry in which he becomes an intern that is even more cynical than the non tribute to 60s politics. Nothing seems to have any meaning–their art, painting, dance, radical filmmaking, relationships, journalism: it's completely wrong to hollow the period out like this.
If you like this period, and like French film as I do, see J'aime regarder les filles from 2011 I think- the only stupid part of that film is its title. Set in 1981, it's a much richer description of what happens with 20 year olds from different sectors of French society collide during the run- up to Mitterand's election.
Just watched the movie yesterday, and for those who are interested in the high school movement of France in the early '70s and expect the movie to have a say about the topic, it would be a disappointment. Therefore, alter your expectations towards an autobiography of a young artist who is in pursuit of love, his ideals and independence.
The opening of the movie is promising with protests, group of students clashing ideas and then acting based on those ideas. You can actually sense that there is something in the air which is obviously the belief in the revolution. Yet later, it seems quite undecided whether to focus on the aspect of revolutionary ideas or on the personal lives and thoughts of the characters. Both topics can be processed in a movie, however in this one both aspects seems inconclusive.
Also what I see missing in the movie is that all young revolutionaries were not faced a tough life or living a life that is rather comfortable. They want to change things but it seems they are not sure what they want to change or how bad things are for the working class. I am not expecting a person of that age to be fully aware of the situation but I wondered how would they react in a desperate situation. They do not look unhappy with their life.
If I had watched the movie with different expectations, I would have enjoyed it more. It is still likable but not satisfying.