Culture

Something in the Air

A melancholy and memorable film

May 23, 2013
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Olivier Assayas's Something in the Air explores the legacy of May 1968




In French the title is Après Mai; for Anglophones it’s the July 1969 hit of Thunderclap Newman. Olivier Assayas’s film concerns a group of middle-class teenagers in 1971, growing up in the shadow of the May 1968 protests. Like the song, the film is melancholy, ephemeral and curiously memorable.

Assayas previously made a gripping four hour study of Carlos the Jackal and the roots of 1970s terrorism. The relatively unknown young cast here make this a prettier prospect, almost too pretty at times; yet for all the characters’ foibles and hypocrisies, Something in the Air remains engaging. The film depicts the squabbles between left, far left and round the bend, and the absurd middle-class pretensions of some of the post-’68ers, but there’s real loss, too, as utopian ideals fizzle out in the pursuit of love, work and art. Unlike most recreations of the period the film is neither cynical nor sappy. Assayas (who was 16 in 1971) has taken particular care with the soundtrack from Amazing Blondel to Tangerine Dream—a personal mixtape of a distant revolution.