Something in the Air

“Apres Mai” is the title of the Olivier Assayas film shown in this country under the name “Something in the Air.” The French title refers to the student riots that convulsed Paris in May 1968 and Assayas’ movie is a portrait of young people living in the aftermath of that upheaval -- the story takes place in 1971. The movie is bright, agile, very pretty in an understated way, and populated by radiant young people. Everyone in the picture is between the ages of 15 and 25 -- we see a couple of scenes with the father of one of the young men central to the film, a high school boy named Gilles, but those episodes pass quickly, without much emphasis, and are basically inconsequential. The movie is the portrait of a world unfettered by any kind of authority. The kids are in revolt, but their revolution proceeds in a kind of weightless vacuum -- there is really no valid or oppressive authority against which they are revolting. The few adults that we see in the picture -- and we merely glimpse them obliquely, as if from the corner of our eye -- are ineffectual, embarrassed by their position of alleged dominance, and have lost all self-confidence: they don’t seem to know what they stand for any more than the kids rioting in the streets. Assayas starts the film with some quick and vicious street-fighting, lots of children darting through the alleyways pursued by other children, a free-for-all in which people are being beaten and gassed that is, nonetheless, a kind of sporting event, a lark for those involved. Three young men are the focus of the film, Gilles, Alain, and Jean-Pierre -- we see them initially in their High School, studying Pascal, and Assayas suggests that Pascal’s vision of life as an oasis between abstract eternities, an existential wager in the here and now, somehow animates and underlies the chaos that we see. The movie proceeds in a series of brief vignettes, little chapters that are two or three or four minutes long -- the kids debate politics in a callow and pointless way, scrawl anarchist graffiti on their High school walls and skirmish with security guards. At one point, the skirmishing gets out of control and Molotov cocktails are hurled; a security guard is badly injured resulting in some kind of lawsuit against Jean-Pierre, probably not even the boy who hurled the bag of concrete that wounded the security guard who is, himself, just another kid. Gilles and Alain aspire to be painters. Gilles’ girlfriend, the beautiful Laure, goes to London and later Ibiza with her hippie parents. Angry at her departure, Gilles goes to Italy to support some workers on strike at a factory. Alain accompanies him and meets an American girl. With the American girl, Alain goes to Kabul -- he is on his way to Nepal, but the kids only get as far as Afghanistan. Gilles has a brief romance with a girl, but doesn’t love her. She joins a troupe of radical film makers and, after a trip to sketch at Pompeii, Gilles returns to Paris. Everyone in the picture is radical in some way -- involved in incomprehensible political squabbling, either a Maoist or a Trotskyite, or an avant-garde film maker or musician: the sound track is vibrant with Captain Beefheart and Tangerine Dream. No one has to work and money seems magically plentiful; I think Assayas is imagining a world in which money is essential non-existent, a beautiful fantasy but a fantasy nonetheless. People have brief love-affairs and the picture is beautifully shot -- the scenes involving the young people at parties, particularly an episode involving a house-party where the beautiful Laure is apparently killed in a fire, are voluptuous and magical, lit with a gorgeous radiance that suggests nostalgic memories, recollection enhanced by psychedelic Technicolor. The people are all fabulously attractive and articulate and they seem to be completely free. Assayas films this all without any hypocritical remorse or condemnation, without passing any judgment on the characters and their milieu; the director is not interested in demonstrating the irresponsible stupidity of most of what we see -- instead, the picture glories in the fresh young faces, the enthusiasm of these children, their optimism and hope. The movie ends with Gilles in London working on exploitation films at Pinehurst Studios -- Gilles is obviously a surrogate for Assayas. Gilles is a gofer on a film improbably involving half-naked big-breasted girls, Nazis, and a dinosaur like the fire-breathing dragon in Fritz Lang’s “Siegfried.” After work, Gilles goes to a cinema, watches some short experimental films, and the movie concludes with a vision of the sylph-like Laure, impossibly beautiful, but a wraith, gliding toward the camera. Wordsworth in his great “Prelude” wrote about his own youthful adventures in Paris during the Revolution and said “Bliss was it to be alive in those days” -- a sentiment that Assayas conveys in this ambitious, complex, and ultimately unsatisfying film. The director’s point-of-view is observant, ostensibly objective, but fundamentally nostalgic -- the movie gestures toward politics but is really about the joy of being young, handsome and in love. There isn’t much to this picture but it is very beautiful and I enjoyed it a great deal, although, in the end, I can’t quite identify any reason that I would recommend the picture to anyone -- it’s a Utopian fantasy that doesn’t seem to know how untrue it is. Ultimately, a world without adults is no kind of world at all.