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 through the joy of life,opium,sex and lots of 60's hallucinatory references.A wonderful homage for whatever the case may be.
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.
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 film 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.
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 of opinion extends to perceptions of the film's intentions themselves.
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.
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.
MCT:September 16, 2008
MCT:September 6, 2008
MCT:February 7, 2008
