Après mai

Olivier Assayas (2012)

Something in the Air is about a group of left-wing middle-class French kids in their late teens trying, three years after the events of May ’68, to rekindle the revolutionary fervour that brought those events about.  The writer-director Olivier Assayas has an interesting subject but no interesting people to bring it to life:  after a while, I was wishing this had been a documentary, even a conventional one, with middle-aged talking heads reminiscing about their radical youth and archive film evidence of the way their generation lived then.  The shaping of the film is less defined than it might have been in a documentary and Assayas has directed his young cast to interpret the characters they’re playing in a dully naturalistic style:  these characters are there to be observed and to make political points rather than to engage the audience as people.  The protagonist Gilles (Clément Métayer) ends up in London working as a gofer on a daft sci-fi film but with an appetite for higher cinema:  he spends the day among prehistoric monsters and Nazis at Pinewood and his evening at the Electric Cinema.  Christine (Lola Créton), the girl who loves him, stays in Paris working – skivvying – for agitprop documentary film-makers who aren’t as progressive as they think.  (The one with whom Christine has a relationship regards feminists and lesbians as the same thing.)  In moving to London, Gilles rejects both the doctrinaire politics of some of his high school friends and the Maigret adaptations which epitomise his director father’s work for French television.

Olivier Assayas, born in January 1955, is evidently recalling his own past and Gilles is his alter ego.  According to Wikipedia, Assayas’s father was:

‘… French director/screenwriter Jacques Rémy … Assayas started his career in the industry by helping him. He ghostwrote episodes for TV shows his father was working on when his health failed. … [Assayas] made his [feature film directing] debut in 1986, after directing some short films and writing for the influential film magazine Cahiers du cinéma.’

There’s always a risk with autobiographical material that the author takes it for granted his strong personal feelings about it will naturally communicate themselves.  Something in the Air appears to be an example of this happening, which is to say not happening.   The political and moral choices faced by the characters aren’t as unusual as Assayas seems to want to imply – it’s just that he was born into a class and at a time that mean the choices were faced in this particular form.

The movie’s English title draws you in although in fact there’s nothing on the soundtrack as good as the Thunderclap Newman song, with the possible exception of the hardly contemporary (1962) ‘Green Onions’, heard playing on a jukebox at one point.  The French title is obviously very different:  it implies dealing with the complexities of aftermath to 1968, the theme of the excellent Alain Tanner movie, Jonah Who Will Be 25 In the Year 2000.  That film appeared in 1976 so another on the same subject might seem overdue and Olivier Assayas is, in any case, dealing with characters at least a semi-generation younger than Tanner’s protagonists.   The students’ behaviour in Something in the Air is initially surprising and verging on shocking:  aggro with the police, who use tear gas and truncheons to break up a demonstration, is followed by terrorism that results in serious injury to a security guard.  As the film goes on, however, the selection of illustrations of the counterculture becomes increasingly familiar:  Buddhism; finding yourself in faraway places (even if one of these places – Kabul – has very different connotations in retrospect); Gregory Corso’s Gasoline poems.    Some of the cast have good faces – although they tend to be pictorial rather than fully expressive – but their voices are, for the most part, meticulously monotonous.  To be fair to Clément Métayer, he is relatively likeable – and particularly good in the scene in which Gilles argues with his father (André Marcon) about Georges Simenon’s merits or demerits:   there’s a suggestion of Gilles’s intellectual vitality here that’s missing in most of the movie.   The film has a light, quick movement:  the cinematographer is Eric Gautier and the editor Luc Barnier.

5 June 2013