By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3.2 cats
Director: Olivier Assayas
Starring: Carol Combes | Clément Métayer | Felix Armand | Hugo Conzelmann | Lola Créton
Original language title: Après mai
Country: france
Year: 2013
Running time: 122
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1846472/
Thom says: “I was to learn before the screening that Assayas had won the best script at the Venice Film Festival. If truly that is the case I’d hate to know what the other choices were as this autobiographical film is a bit of a shambles and all over the place. The young Assayas is drifting along, deciding what to do with his life while having affairs, getting involved with student revolutionaries, travelling, hanging with friends & generally experiencing life. I love Assayas (DEMONLOVER, etc.) but this is rather self-indulgent. 3.5 cats”
Bruce says: “Being an Assayas fan, I was very much looking forward to SOMETHING IN THE AIR, an autobiographical take on his formative years. His SUMMER HOURS was also a fictionalization of a phase in his personal family history involving delightful memories and a disturbing distancing from his siblings that occurred just before and after their mother died.
“SOMETHING IN THE AIR begins with three good high school friends who are working for leftist causes ’somewhere not far from Paris’ in 1971. They print and distribute pamphlets, join demonstrations and get involved in some terrorist activities. One of the group gets arrested. When the others firebomb a security guard station, one of the guards is hurt badly and ends up in a coma. Authorities arrest the one boy who had nothing to do with the act; his sin was having a prior arrest. The others flee to Italy. Gilles (Clement Metayer) is cast in the Asssayas role of a young man who wants to be an artist but is torn by politics and love.
“In political mode, all the young boys behave like grown men; add a girl into the equation and each one suffers unbearably from teen angst. That of course is an exaggeration. The blind truth is that the young men aren’t sure how to position their rebelliousness. In Italy it is obvious when Gilles meets other ardent anarchists there is a hierarchy to the subculture just as there is elsewhere. It is also in Italy where the filmmaking spark ignites. He meets revolutionaries who are filmmakers. ‘Revolutionary films adopt revolutionary styles. Our goal is to enlighten the proletariat; revolutionary syntax is for the bourgeoisie.’ Those words strike a chord for Gilles, but before Gilles true trajectory is found he must resolve all the issues that are pulling him in many directions.
“There isn’t anything wrong with SOMETHING IN THE AIR but there is nothing wildly compelling about the film, either. Had this been a cautionary tale it might have been more interesting. As a coming of age memoir it proves that often the stories we think are profound are not all that riveting for others. 3 cats”
Chris says: “Olivier Assayas is a master when it comes to style and tone, but he hits (CLEAN, SUMMER HOURS) as much as he misses (DEMONLOVER) in telling a satisfying story. This presumably autobiographical 1971-set study of French anarchist teenagers influenced by the student protests of three years before sadly falls into the latter category even though it contains enough thrilling, intricate sequences (such as the epic, breakneck-paced vandalizing of a school building and a bonfire-fueled spectacle set to Soft Machine’s ‘Why Are We Sleeping’) to justify a two-hour-long running time. If Assayas’ stand-in, Gilles (Clément Métayer) came off as less of a cipher or had a character arc that transcended the old ‘budding artist sleeps with various women as he finds himself’ trope, then the film might have signified as more than just another coming-of-age period piece with few distinguishing marks beyond time and place. 3 cats”