Regular Lovers (Les Amants Réguliers)

Cert 18
3 out of 5 3
Regular Lovers (Les Amants Reguliers)
Nostalgia-free ... Regular Lovers

When Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers came out two years ago - his sexy, swooning tribute to the spirit of Paris in 1968 - I felt that watching it was like drinking a bottle of red wine, all at once, on an empty stomach. Now the veteran soixante-huitard director Philippe Garrel has released his own austere variation on the same theme, and it is a very different sort of bottle - like those challenging and difficult local French wines purists reportedly prefer to the pumped-up, over-oxygenated variety produced for the American palate. Like Bertolucci's picture, Regular Lovers stars the director's own broodingly beautiful son, Louis Garrel, in a similar sort of role, and Regular Lovers would appear to be in answer, or even in rebuke to The Dreamers. If that movie was a sexy sell-out, this is a sell-in - the biggest, longest, dourest and unsexiest sell-in imaginable - but with mesmeric moments, none the less. Regular Lovers runs for three hours and is shot in a beautiful but severe monochrome by cinematographer William Lubtchansky. One fey aesthete among the student revolutionaries delivers a bon mot to the effect that someone of his sensibilities is torn between "the pleasure of wearing bright colours and the necessity of wearing dark colours". Garrel and Lubtchansky have certainly stayed faithful to this latter necessity.

  1. Regular Lovers (Les Amants Réguliers)
  2. Production year: 2004
  3. Country: France
  4. Runtime: 178 mins
  5. Directors: Philippe Garrel
  6. Cast: Clotilde Hesme, Eric Rulliat, Louis Garrel
  7. More on this film

Louis Garrel plays François, a saturnine young poet doing his best to avoid military service and whose attempts to evade the call-up, including a dramatic rooftop escape, punctuate a life of passionate lassitude: he hangs out with his similarly inclined friends, they lounge around; they smoke opium and talk about poetry. Not all that much politics, though, and unlike the young pleasure-lovers in The Dreamers, they do not touch upon the self-indulgent and frivolous subject of cinema. When François finds love with Lilie (Clotilde Hesme), there is no bourgeois sexiness in the way the relationship is presented.

Of course, they are committed to the revolution, and when the barricades go up in May, François and his friends are right behind them. At one stage, a breathless, excited and terrified François reports to his friends that someone just handed him a Molotov cocktail and he could have incinerated five cops in a van: but the thought revolted him and he couldn't do it. However, the riots of 1968 are not rendered in conventionally dramatic terms, and are often not rendered at all. When they are not occurring off-camera, they appear in long, stylised, hallucinatory takes. Flames and clouds of tear gas appear almost impressionistically on Garrel's canvas, against which cops make menacing but static silhouettes. Sometimes Garrel will show an alley through which protesters and police will run right to left, in a kind of frieze. It all happens almost in a dream, and Garrel has a daring moment in which this night scene, illuminated by the flickering light of torched cars, morphs into an imagined painterly tableau of 1789, with the rebels in different costumes. In Paris, it is not a difficult conceptual leap to make: it would be much less plausible for London or Moscow. Eventually, disillusion sets in among the students, estranged from the factory workers, and one intellectual mutters about "making a revolution for the working class, despite the working class". But everything happens slowly, and for long periods of time nothing is happening at all.

There is one shot, of a depressed girl's face, that is held for such a long time, and with such immobility, that I thought it must be a still photograph. When the police officer comes to arrest François, he pulls a gun on him - and Lubtchansky does not show the gun. Most exasperatingly, there is a very long sequence in which François's elderly grandfather shows him a magic trick that once enchanted him as a child, and Lubtchansky does not show how the trick works, although we can broadly imagine.

This is an uncompromising, unflinchingly difficult movie in the gnomic Godardian argot, complete with intertitles, that has not been fashionable for decades. The film behaves as if these particular arguments and événements are still current; in its style, it might almost have been made in 1968. All this may well send modern audiences running for the hills, but they would miss a startling and intriguing piece of work. There are moments of visionary fascination and gritty, gloomy authenticity that are absent from Bertolucci's digitally burnished memory of 1968.

Regular Lovers probably gives a better idea of what the uprising was actually like, more faithful than the sexier, romanticised semi-celebratory fictions. Those were, to quote the old Chinese curse, interesting times, but there were periods of boredom, and hanging around at meetings and parties, and bad sex and bad drugs and a vast amount of hot air expelled by the revolutionaries and hangers-on who made it all possible. It is an interestingly un-rewritten kind of history that Garrel is creating here, and for all the poetic licence he awards himself, there is a notable absence of anything resembling nostalgia. The violence and inarticulate idealism, and the disappointments and frustrations of youth, are still swirling around in Philippe Garrel's head, and he transfers them, almost unedited, on to the cinema screen.

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