Some­thing in the Air

In films such as cinephile extrav­a­gan­za Irma Vep, inti­mate addic­tion dra­ma Clean and expan­sive ter­ror­ist biopic Car­los, the high­ly tal­ent­ed French direc­tor Olivi­er Assayas has shown him­self to be quite as delight­ful­ly (and chal­leng­ing­ly) adept at genre-hop­ping as those mae­stros the Coen brothers.

Assayas’ lat­est film, inspired by his own 2002 book ​‘A Post-May Ado­les­cence (Let­ter To Alice Debord)’, takes us back to the con­cerns and peri­od of his ear­li­er Cold Water. It dal­lies with auto­bi­og­ra­phy as it evokes the polit­i­cal half- life of the ​“rev­o­lu­tion­ary” events in France of May 1968 and their effects on a young sub­ur­ban Parisian stu­dent not entire­ly unlike the 58-year-old direc­tor himself.

The movie’s a riot, both polit­i­cal and emo­tion­al. It’s set, ini­tial­ly, in a sec­ondary school out­side Paris in 1971 – itself a fren­zy of agit­prop meet­ings, insur­rec­tion­ist schem­ing and planned RER daytrips to the city cen­tre to do bat­tle with the ​“fas­cist” spe­cial secu­ri­ty squads. The film then floats off to Tus­cany and Lon­don to fol­low the sen­ti­men­tal jour­ney of 18-year-old artist and design­er Gilles (Clé­ment Métayer).

This is Assayas’ por­trait of the artist as a young film­mak­er. The end of the jour­ney – not to give any­thing away – sees Gilles tak­ing up a job as a ​“gofer” on a crea­ture fea­ture film­ing at Pinewood. And, in the tra­di­tion of such por­traits (from those by Joyce to Dylan Thomas), it is as much a sor­row­ful ​‘Good­bye To All That’ as a re-viv­i­fi­ca­tion of the look, sound and feel of per­son­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant times past, not to say some kind of con­fes­sion of the fol­ly, roman­tic and intel­lec­tu­al con­fu­sion and con­flict­ing, height­ened emo­tion of a young self.

Such ambi­tion, such bal­ance, such for­bear­ance. It’s high­ly laud­able work from Assayas and it’s not sur­pris­ing if, at times, the film can seem, super­fi­cial­ly, either mean­der­ing or cold­ly dis­tant. Let’s just say Gilles is indeed mean­der­ing and the movie is touch­ing­ly true to that. He’s also a mite tac­i­turn – who isn’t at 18? – and Métay­er down­plays him so as not to upstage the rest of the cast, many of whom are non-pro­fes­sion­als coached to per­form just a lit­tle like Bresson’s ​‘mod­els’ in Four Nights Of A Dreamer.

Arguably, too, Some­thing in the Air is over- dense: quo­ta­tions abound, from the cin­e­mat­ic and his­tor­i­cal to the social and philo­soph­i­cal, from Blaise Pas­cal to Cap­tain Beef­heart. Indeed the film’s pro­gres­sive rock sound­track plays first-among-equals in the film’s orches­tra of ele­ments. The extra­or­di­nary peri­od recre­ation is a trib­ute to both the resource­ful­ness of pro­duc­tion design­er François-Renaud Labarthe, Assayas’ prodi­gious mem­o­ry and pho­to­graph­ic eye for detail, and the attuned flu­id­i­ty of the director’s reg­u­lar cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Eric

Gau­ti­er. It pro­vides set-piece after set-piece: rau­cous polit­i­cal meet­ings; sex beneath the ​‘Spooky Tooth’ posters; the­atri­cal light shows; drop­ping acid at bac­cha­na­lian par­ties. It takes your breath away by virtue of its com­bi­na­tion of truth­ful ambi­ence and accu­ra­cy of obser­va­tion, cov­er­ing every inch of the frame.

The result is an exhil­a­rat­ing and demand­ing film that is as full of inter­est­ing con­flicts and con­tra­dic­tions as its pro­tag­o­nist. The dialec­tic it describes, as befits a por­trait of a child of Marx and Coca-Cola, is sim­i­lar to that between the roman­ti­cism of mem­o­ry and the cold light of real­i­ty. It could also be Assayas’ best, most reveal­ing and – dare we say it – fun­ni­est film to date.