Les Amants reguliers (Regular Lovers) poster & wallpaper

Caroline Deruas-Garrel, Clotilde Hesme, Eric Rulliat

Antoine and his friends, a group of Parisian students, find themselves caught up in the chaotic excitement of May '68 when students and workers almost toppled a government. Plunging into the thick of ...( read more  read more... )these clashes, we follow this band of disconsolate young men trying to make sense of what happened. As they dust off the soot of the street battles, talk replaces action and each of them inches inexorably into a post-'68 life. Friends fall out with each other, divisions become exposed, and the personal gradually replaces the political. Antoine watches as his group metamorphoses and, as he falls in love with a young woman and starts to make new commitments, feels himself changing as well.

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67% liked it

2,066 ratings

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83% liked it

12 critics

Unrated, 2 hrs. 55 min.

Directed by: Philippe Garrel

Release Date: September 11, 2005

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DVD Release Date: May 22, 2007

Stats: 124 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (124)

  • ebs90
    May 23, 2009
    ebs90
    Les Amants Reguliers is a slice of French new wave in the 2000s. Phillipe Garrel's exploration, interpetration, re-creation of the golden age of French cinema, an homage and a love letter.

    Shot in exhuberant black and white, the film boasts almost magical composition and light...( read more)ing, as well as an inequivocal New Wave pace. Anyone familiar with this movement will automatically feel identification and nostalgia. It reinvigorates the practice of deconstructing life in smaller and bigger pieces and putting together this alternative, but very real, understanding of it as cinematic truth. Garrel's concern is to reflect this truth. That is why the film is poetic but also crude at times.

    LAR is a contemplation of the May 68 revolution, but it mostly concentrates on the aftermath. Antoine and his friends, initially enthusiastic about producing change, about making their ideas prevail and winning the battle against the system, must face the disappointment of defeat and the challenge of real life. They were, perhaps, so centered on "the revolution" they never came up with a life project or a plan B. All they do is smoke opium and listen to music, finding moments of rapture that only enhance the emptiness of the rest of the day. Each of them seeks a separate escape, but each of them is a monumental waste of potential, dreams, and actions. In that sense, this film is tinted with sadness through and through.

    The epicenter of it all is Francois, played by Louis Garrel. He's a poet and a dreamer. He falls in disgrace along with the Revolution, but finds a lifesaver and a motivation in Lilie, a wide-eyed sculptress. They promise to teach each other things and accompany each other. They become partners and they fall deeper and deeper in love, but soon enough their own inconsistencies, the very ones that led them into their existential mess, surface to redefine their priorities.

    The ending is beautiful. Garrel structured it as a divine ascension.

    Francois, Antonie, Lilie, and all their friends, walk, from the beginning of the film, into a dark dead end street. What makes it special is the selection of events, the words, and the obvious nostalgia and empathy that Garrel feels for them. The choice of his son to play Francois was very accurate. Louis Garrel is a very talented actor, completely in tune with his misguided character and with his struggle to find happiness.

    The entire run is a bold one. Garrel does many unusual things that require patience, but in doing them he entices fascination and complete resonance with what is happening on screen. There are many long takes of students in barricades, burning cars and throwing bottles. For some reason, even in spite of their length they work. In a way, because there are many silences and extended takes, Garrel almost invites us to think, re-imagine, reflect, discuss.

    3 hours long and not a second of boredom -for me-. An example of a filmmaker coming to terms with his past and his style, and a film so comprehensive of his life that it is difficult for any other human being not to find vague echoes of his/her own ideas, opinions, feeling, experiences, desires, if they will only sit still long enough to watch the entire thing. In whole, a very human film, and a stylistic success.
  • columbiatch
    May 4, 2008
    columbiatch
    Quite impressive and intimate recollection of the '68 protests and its aftermath on a group of young intellectuals and pseudoartists in Paris. Given that I knew nothing about the historical background of the film nor having seen The Dreamers I probably missed many details. The fi...( read more)lm is beautifully shot in high contrast, under-lit 4:3 ratio. It feels like a silent at times with its silent film transitions. Other than the first hour which depicts a particularly eerie protest and the main character's escape from the police, the film is like a series of vignettes of the youths' aimless bohemian lives. The film is effective at capturing a sense of disillusionment and aimlessness of those people.
  • EarthlyAlien
    February 7, 2008
    EarthlyAlien
    When Regular Lovers premiered in Venice in September 2005, it was hailed as the best French film of the year, and trashed as one of the worst in fifty at the same time. It has been described as mesmerising by some, and mind-numbingly boring by others. This radical division...( read more) of opinion extends to perceptions of the film's intentions themselves.

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    According to many's points of view, the film was a response to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers (there's a scene in which a character makes a reference to a Bertolucci film and then turns to the camera and says "Bernardo Bertolucci"), while others' dismissed that and considered both films as different as water and fire. To find similarities you merely have to look at both films: both were directed by French industry veterans, both star Louis Garrel and follow a group of young people, their lives, loves and participation in the student riots in Paris during May 1968. Director Philippe Garrel even went so far as to borrow and buy props and costumes from Bertolucci's film.

    My opinion? Regular Lovers isn't merely a response The Dreamers. Bertolucci's film - regardless of how much I enjoyed it - lacked some balance and correction in its perspective. It was a somehow artificial, although gorgeous glimpse over the sexual awakening of three idealistic young film buffs, walking around a bohemian Parisian apartment naked like models out of a fashion magazine, listening to the hippest music of the 60s and quoting lines from New Wave films while the real revolution was happening out on the streets. Which is fine. Regular Lovers, however, is told firmly from Garrel's own perspective and his own experience as a youth on the barricades.

    Garrel, known as the Rimbaud of French cinema, turned 20 in 1968 - the same age as his tender poet protagonist, François (played by the director's son Louis). Growing up on the cinema of Truffaut and Godard, the 1970s films of Philippe Garrel, Jean Eustache and Chantal Ackerman are the true inheritors of the legacy of the spirit of the Nouvelle Vague. Regular Lovers consequently has an authenticity that is to some extent autobiographical. Garrel has recounted in interviews his own flight across the rooftops from the French police dramatised here in the film using his own son, and an early static scene of fighting at the barricades is a reconstruction of a documentary called Actu 1, now lost, that Garrel filmed during the student riots in Paris during May 1968.

    With such details, and filmed in a stark black and white in academy ratio that makes the film look and feel like a close relative of Godard's Masculin Féminin or Eustache's La Maman et la Putain, Garrel achieves a fine sense of authenticity that captures the earnest idealism of youth much better than Bertolucci's film, although less pleasant to the eyes, for not being in color and not having Eva Green in it. Louis Garrel's François is a student and a poet, smoking opium with other friends and artists and doing his best to avoid work and compulsory military service. Idealistically, they are prepared to risk prison for these beliefs and, when the mood spills over onto the streets of Paris, they take them one stage further facing the police charges face-to-face, launching Molotov cocktails, manning burning barricades and escaping through the streets to collapse in bed. He meets and falls in love with Lilie (Clotilde Hesme) and together they struggle in the post-revolution to find a new way of living out the ideals they believe in.

    What Garrel is depicting is everything that is essential to youth, everything that drives youth forward - the discovery of oneself and the infinite possibilities that life and art open up to those willing to take a path different from the norm. For some that might be just going to the Cinémateque Français and imitating the cool behaviour of the stars of the Nouvelle Vague, but for Garrel's French youths, it's so much more than that. It really is a matter of life or death. These young men and women believe that their generation can bring about a revolution but, as they light-up and draw on another opium pipe, the agents of the revolution wonder why no one came to join them. It's in that moment that Garrel's film shows the downside to the revolution in the following years - the harsh realities of living, of forgetting friends and being forgotten, of needing to earn money, of living in a country that lacked the prospects for artistic youth and expression, the problems associated with the ideal of free-love and the growing attraction for escape from this life into oblivion.

    The slow, poetic mood of the film is considerably enhanced by the stark, high-contrast black and white cinematography of William Lubtchansky, who has worked previously with all the leading lights of the Nouvelle Vague, including Truffaut, Godard and Rivette. Lubtchansky's cinematography takes us completely and almost literally back to May '68 with images that are close to newsreel footage in authenticity, yet are raised to a level of artistic expression that make the film a blend of a documentary-like historical precision and a hauntingly melodic love story.

    It's more than easy to make the case for Regular Lovers as art over entertainment, and argue that, in the spirit of his lead character, Garrel has created a work that rejects commercial concerns in favour of a form of cinematic poetry, while the opposing view would doubtless accuse the film of being too long (175-minute long) and boring, for its deliberately slow pace. For myself, I found the film intermittently fascinating, deep-eyed and evocative. I can honestly say I'm a slightly more educated, aware and 'better' human being than I was before seeing it.
  • jimbotender
    January 26, 2009
    jimbotender
    Bold cinema,you'd feel it was like some sort of nouvelle vague homage despite the monotony of the characters and their "rebellious" attitude.I was immensely surprised however by the self-destruction of the protagonist Louis Garrel (definitely talented) and the rest of the gang th...( read more)rough the joy of life,opium,sex and lots of 60's hallucinatory references.A wonderful homage for whatever the case may be.
  • quichefolle
    October 12, 2008
    quichefolle
    indéfectible tristesse qui traverse ce film
    Longtemps que j'avais pas apprecie un M Garrel !

    Attention petit bijou
  • PinkSparkle8800
    September 6, 2008
    PinkSparkle8800
    A melancholy meditation upon both the events of May 1968 in Paris and a doomed love affair. Garrel is not just an artless aesthete, he is unexpectedly and intensely romantic -- imagining and realizing a character who can die for love.
  • raqmathias
    July 29, 2008
    raqmathias
    Cerca de três horas do mais puro cinema francês e sua qualidade estonteante
  • danieljparsons
    November 24, 2007
    danieljparsons
    Ok, I have a *slight* thing for Louis Garrel - so sue me!
  • onomatopee
    September 26, 2007
    onomatopee
    it was way too long... and i thought that the sound editing was poor. the story was interesting in itself but the director tried too much to make it look like a 60s french new wave film. i'd rather watch breathless.
  • booloocolls
    February 15, 2007
    booloocolls
    I want to see this, Lois Garrel is ever so sexy..'amore', tho he's not italian is he?

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