Something in the Air – review

Olivier Assayas looks back at the days following the events of May 1968 – and at his own youth – with a delicate wit
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  1. Something in the Air (Après Mai)
  2. Production year: 2012
  3. Country: France
  4. Cert (UK): 15
  5. Runtime: 122 mins
  6. Directors: Olivier Assayas
  7. Cast: Carole Combes, Clement Metayer, Felix Armand, Lola Creton
  8. More on this film

The son of a movie director and now in his 50s, Olivier Assayas has built up an interestingly varied body of work as a critic for Cahiers du cinéma, authored several books including a monograph on Ingmar Bergman, and directed over the past 20 years a succession of modest, intelligent films. Most are concerned with moral problems and social responsibility in a middle-class setting like his Les Destinées sentimentales about a rebellious young man reluctantly taking over the family's prestigious porcelain factory in the 1920s, and Summer Hours, the tale of siblings and their elderly mother gathering to settle the estate of a recently deceased painter. Slightly different are Irma Vep, a cinéaste's celebration of Hong Kong movies and the surreal silent serials of Louis Feuillade, and Carlos, his TV mini-series on the notorious Venezuelan terrorist.

What all those films have in common is a quiet, unobtrusive style and a sharp attention to the social and historical context of their characters' lives, and this continues in his involving, moving and honest new picture, Something in the Air (aka Après mai). It's a semi-autobiographical picture about the French generation that were just reaching their teens in 1968 when the explosive, revolutionary événements took place that May, shaking the nation, politicising the young and creating ripples that have lasted for decades. The cinema and theatre have looked back on those times in different ways: ambiguously by Trevor Griffiths in his 1973 National Theatre play The Party and David Mercer in his RSC play After Haggerty; mockingly by Louis Malle (one of the filmmakers who helped close down the 1968 Cannes festival) in his 1990 film Milou en mai; nostalgically by Bernardo Bertolucci in The Dreamers; in a sad, cynical or despairing mode by a variety of American movies.

Assayas turns a sympathetic, understanding eye on his earlier self and his contemporaries, but he neither invites us to take them at their own evaluation nor forbids us to smile at their pretensions and deep seriousness. The film opens in 1971 and as its French title suggests, May's blissful dawn of sudden change is over. But the spirit of revolution is, as the British title tells us, still in the air. The central character and, we assume, Assayas's cinematic alter ego, is Gilles (Clément Métayer), a handsome 17-year-old in his last year at a suburban Paris lycée and on his way to art school. Assayas establishes his restless world with vivid dispatch. First a political science teacher regales Gilles's class with a passage from Blaise Pascal that ends: "Between us and heaven and hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world." Then we see Gilles reading the numerous left-wing journals produced by competing Maoists, anarchists, Trotskyists, situationists and combinations of all of these. For some of them he writes and contributes illustrations. He takes part in angry, highly articulate, hair-splitting debates and violent demonstrations, hands out leaflets, sprays slogans on walls. One carefully prepared guerrilla attack on the school results in a violent clash with security guards followed by an attack on the guards themselves as class enemies defending the regime.

School breaks up for the summer with the possibility of criminal charges being brought against Gilles and his friend and fellow artist Alain (Félix Armand) when they head off for the summer vacation, helping to spread the revolution into Italy. Gilles breaks up with his beautiful girlfriend Laure Carole Combes), who introduces him to Gregory Corso and the Beat poets; we know from her passionate detachment that she's on the way to something dangerous or glorious. He takes up with the deeply serious Christine (Lola Créton), who's joined a slightly older moviemaking collective, aiming to celebrate and record the working class, whom they worship and to whom they consider themselves inferior. They make the movies, Christine does the cooking and the heavy lifting. They denounce a book criticising Mao as the work of a CIA agent, though Gilles, pondering his career as painter, is becoming a trifle sceptical, something signalled by a collection of Orwell's essays in English on his table. During his Italian trip he meets the rich American redhead Leslie (India Salvor Menuez), a student of modern dance who speaks in a flat whisper and moves with a group of hippies who consult I Ching before making their decisions. Is Leslie, a fraud, a self-deceiver, or just a spoilt, wilful girl?

Leslie is part of a drifting world, compared with the dedicated, unswerving Christine. Like Gilles they're all attempting to keep the flame of the pure revolutionary faith burning within them while working out where that revolution might be leading. Fire is in fact a running symbol through the film. At the same time they're discovering their own identities and asking whether individuality and personal ambition are reconcilable with the revolution. This may seem rather abstract and absurd, but in dramatising Gilles's story Assayas makes it detailed and concrete. Gilles's experiments with different graphic styles have the ring of truth.

The film is often extremely funny. Gilles's liberal father, forced by Parkinson's disease to employ his son as an assistant in the lucrative task of adapting Maigret for French TV, is constantly faced with Gilles's withering comments about engaging in such hackwork. In order to break into moviemaking (the year is now 1975), Gilles gets a job in England as a gofer at Pinewood Studios working on a fantasy adventure about a German U-boat that accidentally lands up on a mysterious island populated by exotic women and prehistoric monsters. Typical of Assayas's accuracy, the latter is a brilliant comic recreation of the popular series of British films (directed by Kevin Connor and starring Doug McClure) that began with The Land That Time Forgot. Equally typically, Gilles assuages his conscience by spending his evenings watching experimental movies at the Electric Cinema in Portobello Road. Something in the Air is not a film for all tastes, but it brings back a crucial part of the last century, touches on experiences we've all had at some time and is performed with delicacy, sincerity and conviction by a splendid young cast.

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