May 03, 2006
les amants réguliers
Philippe Garel was 20 in the May days of 1968; so too is poet François, the lead character in his '68 epic Les amants réguliers (2005). François just happens to be played by Garrel's son Louis, who a year or so before just happened to play one of the leads in wet dreamer Bernardo Bertolucci's film about the same historical occasion, The Dreamers. As if that intertext wasn't enough, somewhere in the middle of Les amants' three hours, a colloquy of stoned kid rock-throwers retreat to the crash pad of their trust-funded confrere to discuss culture. Have you seen Before the Revolution, asks one of another. No? At which point the speaker turns directly to the camera and enunciates, as if it were an elocution lesson, "Bernardo Bertolucci."
To which we can only say: take it outside, boys. Your pissing contest isn't amusing. We would love Les amants to have resurrected the Nouvelle Vague, to have restored dignity to the category "three hour French movie," or simply to have been better than the turgid anti-politics of The Dreamers. Perhaps it is better, if "better" means "less ridiculous" (though by the same token it's "worse," in the sense of "less hot"). Perhaps Garrel's idea — that the failure to disrupt regular life would come back to haunt the regular lovers a thousandfold — is at least an idea rather than a cheap insult. But the gap between what remains to be expressed, and what each film decides is expressive enough, is identical: Way Too Broad.
Michel Houellebecq's drooling, reflexive lampoonings of the soixante-huitards, aside from their Oedipal bathos, have what is either the critical acuity or sheer stupidity to rehearse the most basic distortions of the historical narrative: they present the entirety of the revolutionary desire as concerning personal liberties. In short, according to the way lots of people like to tell it, 1968 was about free love and a higher wage to spend freely on hash, not about toppling a government and revising daily life. We would hope that either Ber-nar-do Ber-to-lu-cci or Phillipe Garel could do better than that, could get at what might have been particular and resonant about that moment. Instead, the two seem simply to have flipped a coin by way of deciding which would tell their drawing-room tale of ruint romance in lurid color, which in somber b/w, as if those were the two approaches to history.