Review of Something in the Air

The filmmaker clearly lived through this period at about the same age as the characters, so I don't understand why the film is both slow and superficial. The (post) Sixties here is fight the police, shout slogans at a meeting, publish a newspaper, sit in a cafe, do some art, read a book about Mao, meet a girl in the woods and take her clothes off, recite poetry out loud, vandalize your school, have another meeting, go to Italy to meet foreign girls, take their clothes off, make radical films, etc. etc. Except no one is having any fun. Not a single person in this film enjoys anything ever about their free and mobile lives-where unlike now people like them age 20 all seem to have plenty of money. No one even smiles when the see a friend they haven't seen in months -- it's the French parodying the French. I won' to bore you with the reactionary representations of political philosophy, drugs, eastern mysticism, or union politics, all of which are brainlessly dismissed as pointless. The core characters drift as though to be post 1968 meant you lived under a shadow. some kind of paralysis. The exposition of character is weak and many plot threads are just dead ends. Our hero keeps shuffling forward, perhaps as a tribute to a film industry in which he becomes an intern that is even more cynical than the non tribute to 60s politics. Nothing seems to have any meaning--their art, painting, dance, radical filmmaking, relationships, journalism: it's completely wrong to hollow the period out like this.

If you like this period, and like French film as I do, see J'aime regarder les filles from 2011 I think- the only stupid part of that film is its title. Set in 1981, it's a much richer description of what happens with 20 year olds from different sectors of French society collide during the run- up to Mitterand's election.