#Something in the air 2012 free#

Counter culture, free press, and experimental cinema were minority movements, and therefore had a powerful aura that today has been lost. The powerful held the monopoly over information and counter culture was a network that developed as a motivated, transnational act of militancy. Back then, of course, this was not the case. Everything is accessible to everybody the whole time. Today, information has been democratised for best and for worst. I don't think so, and I think that the film lets transpire my disillusionment on the subject. That's the job of journalism.ĭo you think that a free press revolution like the one shown in the film would still be possible nowadays? I don't wish to direct their gaze, or inform them in a certain way. It can show the contradictions in our complex world for the audience to make up their own mind. I don't think cinema is a means of communication. From these events that I wanted to portray as faithfully as possible, members of the audience can extract their own message if they want.

I describe a period that existed and a generation of politically conscious students' faith in the future. Leftism was quite sad and violent, and this was reflected among the youth upholding the changes of May 1968, who asked themselves how they could join this movement for change to be heard and serve a purpose.ĭoes the film carry a message of hope for the future? I remember a certain melancholy and political seriousness. There is the presence of love, tenderness, and nature, but it's true that I have slightly stepped away from works that describe adolescence as a wildly fun period of partying and flirting. I had already made a film about my adolescence, Cold Water, but my approach was more poetic than in Something in the Air which seems more fictional to me. Why did you wait all these years to describe this era in finally quite a sad way?

They didn't exist in 1968 and were later dissolved following a secondary school student's death after he received a bad blow. Did you invent this concept of a pair of policemen on their motorbikes using their truncheons like in an episode of Mad Max ?įrench riot policemen on motorbikes, the special brigades that I show in the film, were still new in 1971 but they were very real. The first protest is particularly violent. These are secondary school students discovering the world, not those who actually brought about the 1968 revolution. There were workers, employees, artists, and civil servants. It's a young circle with people from everywhere. They come from the Parisian middle class in which I grew up. Olivier Assayas: Beyond the main character, who is the one that resembles me most as he is from an artistic and quite bourgeois background, I did not define the other characters' social backgrounds. These post-1968 youth are interested in the working class, but you don't portray them as actually coming from it. Free of nostalgia and not overly critical in hindsight, it captures the immediacy of youth in hugely endearing fashion.French director Olivier Assayas spoke to Cineuropa about Something in the Air, his latest feature film selected for the official competition at the 69th Venice Film Festival.

While his friends and his girlfriend are consumed with the political struggle of their times. Other friends embrace and reject esoteric niches of the political counterculture. In the early 1970s, Paris is filled with political unrest. A new love, Christine (the terrific Lola Créton, last seen in Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘Goodbye First Love’, with which this film shares a similar tone and semi-autobiographical air), must choose between Gilles and radical cinema. But the writer-director of ‘Summer Hours’ and ‘Carlos’ keeps returning to Gilles (Clement Metayer), presumably an alter ego, who watches an older love, Laure (Carole Combes), betray him for hard drugs and an older man. It’s a captivating and fresh snapshot of a well-documented time. They join demonstrations, work for the free press, hand out leaflets and graffiti their school with slogans by night. It’s a portrait of a time too intense to last forever, and brightly burning flames that must inevitably flicker or die altogether.Īssayas moves with ease among various young men and women, all friends fired by revolutionary idealism. So it’s a coming-of-age story for all time in one sense, but the special ideas and idealism of the early 1970s mean that these characters’ horizons are forever expanding and their choices seemingly infinite. An ensemble drama with a pleasingly light touch, it looks back with warmth and candour at the lives of these young people as they confront their beliefs, their loves and their ambitions head-on. Olivier Assayas’s ‘Something in the Air’ is a swooning and swirling but always level-headed study of the lives of a small group of suburban Parisian teenagers in the years soon after 1968.

Something in the air 2012