An Unsentimental Education

Originally published in Ukula, May 2007.
Les Amants Réguliers (2005)
Phillipe Garrel
France
178 minutes

"We're all slaves of fashion," former Red Army Faction member Astrid Proll whispered to an interviewer in 2002. Revolution is sexy. Who could forget that god awful Diesel ad campaign? Or "Prada Meinhof chic" ? Is it my generation's careful attention to surface coupled with relative political complacency that leads media and fashion circles to fetishize violent youth movements? Phillipe Garrel's film Les Amants réguliers, an unsentimental meditation on Paris 1968 and its aftermath, takes the glitter and sensuality out of youthful dissent.

The film depicts young revolutionaries/opium addicts in the tedium of their day to day existence. Over the course of three hours they make art, hurl bricks, smoke opium, fuck, smoke more opium, write poetry, fall in and out of love, and smoke even more opium. This may sound lofty, but love and revolution is portrayed as overwhelmingly ordinary, almost haphazard and accidental. The film lacks the gritty air of sexuality historically ascribed to the French student movement, Baader Meinhof Gang/RAF and the Weather Underground. Garrel's unflinching view of the 1968 protests is based on lost documentary footage he shot of the riots as a young man. There are no climatic demonstrations, slogans or fancy Alpha Romeo get away cars in this film. The brick hurling in Les Amants réguliers is depicted in ultra-static long shots. A few cars burn, but other than that not much happens. The glacial pacing and austere high contrast black and white film posits a distance between the spectator and the film's characters that mirrors the distance between the characters and their actions.

After the demonstrations, an almost wordless love affair ensues between the disillusioned young poet François, played to pouty perfection by the director's son Louis Garrel, and Lilie, a sculptress played by Clotilde Hesme. The two pass each other with little fan fare dans la rue and meet several months later in the home of Antoine, a wealthy and troubled young man who financially supports a motley crew of twenty-somethings in his sprawling Parisian apartment.

Despite being set in a supposed revolutionary hot bed, there is little romance or political fervor in their intimacy. Francois and Lilie are resigned rather than compelled to acquiesce to the loose and easy sexual mores of the late 60s. In one scene, Lilie tells Francois that she wants to "do it" with their benefactor Antoine's cousin. Garrel does not follow the drama to the bedroom, but keeps his camera focused on Francois laying bored and dejected in bed. Lilie soon returns showing no signs of arousal or sexual abandon and plops down on their bed announcing that the cousin has "the smallest pecker ever" and that Francois' is much larger. The emotive threshold of the characters is surprisingly low and the overarching emotion tenor seems to be blankness and fear, but mostly blankness.

Garrel's film will not feed an audience hungry for a stylized depiction of revolutionary defiance. He gives us the moments in between. The moments where aimlessness is merely aimlessness and unease, self doubt, and boredom rule the day.