At Alliance Française on Fridays at 8 pm
At Alliance Française on Friday, April 24: Les Amants réguliers / Regular Lovers (2005) by Philippe Garrel – 178 mins (a long bugger!) – France, Drama.B&W.English subtitles. Generally favorable reviews: 76/67 out of 100.
With Louis Garrel, Clothilde Hesme, Julien Lucas.
In 1969 a group of young people get hooked on opium after living through the events of 1968 together. A crazy love affair begins between two twenty-year-olds in the group who spotted each other during those heady, hazy days of the student uprising...
– Alliance description
The New York Times, Manohla Dargis:This tender portrait of late-1960s French youth stars Louis Garrel as François, a 20-year-old Parisian struggling through the fires of revolutionary promise and its smoldering remains. Written and directed by his father, the celebrated auteur Philippe Garrel, the film begins with a handful of gangling young men sharing a pipe filled with hashish and talking of poetry. It is early 1968 in Paris, moments before the revolution or, rather, moments before that nearly forgotten flashpoint when cities across the world lighted up with radical promise and burning cars.
Soon after the film opens, François and his friends exit their narcotic haze and almost instantly take to the newly formed barricades, replacing one dream with another. Idealistic and naïve — one would-be Communard solemnly wonders if this can be “‘a revolution for the working class despite the working class” — these would-be insurgents fight with ideas and gestures that seem confused and at times haphazard, but their optimism has delivered them into a state of grace.
The older Mr. Garrel was himself all of 20 when Paris erupted that shocking May, and this achingly poignant film is a testament to that time as well as somewhat of a memento mori.
At Alliance Française on Friday, May 1: Holiday! Labor Day! No showing.
At Alliance Française on Friday, May 8: Holiday! National Ploughing Ceremony Day! No showing.
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