NYFF Review: Les Amants Réguliers (Regular Lovers)

Les Amants Réguliers (Regular Lovers), the latest from Philippe Garrel, appears to be the director's response to Bernardo Bertolucci and his 2003 take on Paris '68, The Dreamers. Shot in gorgeous black and white by William Lubtchansky (cinematographer on a handful of Godard films), it not only captures the Paris of that tumultuous year, but feels like a genuine artifact from the era. That both The Dreamers and Les Amants Réguliers feature Garrel's son Louis in a leading role is only the first of the similarities between the two. Les Amants Réguliers takes the basic structure of The Dreamers and turns it on its head. Whereas Bertolucci kept his young somnambulists holed up in an apartment until the final moments, Garrel chooses to open the film with the May riots (under the chapter heading "Hopes of Fire"), and this lengthy sequence, with its deep shadows and dreamlike landscapes contains the film's strongest moments, ending with a dawn trek across the rooftops of Paris that more than justifies Lubtchansky's recent award at Venice. With such a powerful first third, how can Garrel possibly top that in the two hours that follow? Therein lies the problem -- the remainder of the film, which follows the post-May existence of a group of friends, has some wonderful moments, but lacks the vitality (and brilliance) of the first hour. Francois (Louis Garrel) and his fellow jeunesse dorée sit around, smoke copious amounts of opium, dance to Nico and The Kinks (in scenes reminiscent of the Heroin sequence from Last Days), and discuss poetry, politics, cinema, and the failed revolution -- they have become the dreamers. Francois eventually falls in love with Lilie (Clotilde Hesme), a sculptor, and their budding relationship has a real Nouvelle Vague feel to it. Garrel romanticizes romance like no other, and the entire sequence would fit nicely in an early Godard, Rohmer, or Eustache film. Jean-Claude Vannier's piano score, which begins with quiet, melodic themes, soon turns to almost discordant hammering as the relationship both intensifies and self-destructs. Just as Bertolucci's film began with Michael Pitt's arrival from America, so Garrel's film ends with a character leaving Paris for Brooklyn. Though he hasn't explicitly stated a dissatisfaction with The Dreamers, there is a moment in the film that is quite telling. During a discussion of Before the Revolution, a young woman slowly turns to the camera and says "Bernardo Bertolucci". Could this be interpreted as a dig -- as a means of explicitly reminding us of the great director he once was? Even with its flaws, Les Amants Réguliers is still essential viewing for any lover of cinema. Three hours of moments in time, with many of them nothing short of mesmerizing.

Comments

[Sal C.]

Filmbrain -
You and I responded to the film in very much the same way, but my reading was a little different. After a charged hour of startlingly beautiful young people falling in and out love, smoking dope, and hurling the occasional Molotov cocktail, the film does seem to peter out like a wind-up toy coming to a stop. I feel, however that this was quite deliberate. Garrel is trying to come to grips with how the revolutionary promise of May '68 was dashed in the months that followed as people succumbed to their own inadequacies, vices, etc. It's a theme that runs through many of his films - young lives filled with a fire that are slowly extinguished as the everyday realities of life slowly accumulate. Now, a serious gripe - The film's subtitles are in white with NO SHADING. That means that whenever the bottom of the screen was white (someone's shirt, the side of a building, etc) the subtitles were impossible to read. I was dumfounded that the film would show at the Festival like this – I would estimate that a quarter of the titles were illegible. A major cock-up on someone’s part.

[msic]

Filmbrain,

Good comments on the Garrel, however I disagree that the film peters out and especially with the notion that the 68ers have become "the dreamers" by the second half. Part of what's so emotionally wrenching about REGULAR LOVERS is the way in which these young people treat the immediate aftermath of May '68 as an interlude for regrouping, since (in the thick of it) they do not yet know that the revolution will not happen. They are still thinking, planning, but also falling into more personal modes of exploration. They are trying to radicalize their subjectivities and their private lives, opening them up to a form of personal socialism, if you will.

Of course, this does represent a shift in the priorities of the 68ers, and from our present-day viewpoint we can very easily see all of this degenerating into a sex- and drug-fueled haze. But just because bourgeouis solipsism has triumphed in the Western democracies (hitting its apogee in American consumer capitalism) doesn't mean that Garrel's young radicals are always-already there. There are numerous ways that the aftermath could have yielded a different utopia (cf. Marcuse, who addresses this explicitly), and only at the very end of the film does Garrel give us the sign that utopian thinking, for the time being, has been quashed.

To put this less politcally and more formally, whether one sees REGULAR LOVERS as a portrait of utopia-in-evolution or as utopia's death throes will depend on how one sees the Nouvelle Vague in relation to the cinema and milieu of Andy Warhol. REGULAR LOVERS owes just as much to Warhol's languid 16mm portraiture and his conviction that something truly happens whenb "nothing is happening" as it does to Godard and Eustache.

Obviously, some see Warhol as the last word in political (and aesthetic) quietism and capituation, but I think Garrel sees a beauty, a power, and an untapped resource for the future. Of course he's also ambivalent about that world. (After all, Nico's heroin overdose gives the lie to Warholian "fabulousness.") But he's not condemning it the way he's condemning Bertolucci's failed attempt in THE DREAMERS. Perhaps Godard and Warhol (and May '68 and its hangover) represent two dreams that fail on their own, that we need to dialectically sublate, but haven't figured out how.

[la_depressionada]

wow filmboy i can't believe how much those 2 look like us. they STOLE our look.

[Steve]

Nico didn't OD. If memory serves, she was hit by a car while riding a bike in Spain.

[Sal C.]

Steve -
You are absolutely correct regarding Nico's death. She died from internal bleeding after a bike accident in Ibiza. It is a pivitol aspect of Garrel's intensly autobiographical "I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar".

[msic]

I stand corrected. My apologies. I was thrown off by Garrel's last film, "Sauvage Innocence," which in this context I misread.

[Sam Adams]

My interpretation of the Bertolucci callout is that the title is key: As a bourgeois intellectual, BB has only ever been able to imagine himself as a revolutionary third wheel, witness to the revolution but never part of it. (Personally, I consider this one of Bertolucci's strongest points as an artist, but I digress.) Based simply on the structure of AMANTS, Garrell's beef with Bernardo seems to be that DREAMERS ends with the naive promise of students overturning the government still a possibility, while Garrell lays out in overwhelming detail exactly what does happen to a dream deferred. Instead of BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, it's the revolution, and after.

[Ben Wilson]

I believe that it's 'Venus in Furs' playing in Last Days, rather than 'Heroin'. Minor quibble...