Olivier Assayas Poll

Something In The Air is a real drag

I'm cool with the three finalists.

Something in the Air (orig title: Apres Mai) is not a real drag, but I suppose it is a sort of downer-sequel to Cold Water, as it's set in the going-downhill era of student radicalism (1971-72), and CW had a better (or more original?) bonfire scene.

And looking at this dude is not any kind of drag:

http://images.movieplayer.it/2012/12/14/qualcosa-nell-aria-clement-metayer-in-una-scena-del-film-261174.jpg

They were all very pretty but the lead actress in particular was a cinematic sedative

she was a Serious Young Lady, didn't bother me.

Pretty close to Number None above on Something in the Air--pedestrian, anyway (or maybe I've just seen variations on this basic material too many times now). And the deadpan of everyone--lead guy in particular--wears me down after a while. Doesn't anyone here ever smile? The Nick Drake song was nice, and I've got to track down the Kevin Ayers song played over the end credits.

Watching this tonight.

had a really gd time at this, last night. i thought it was actually quite different subject matter for a film - the immediate post-'68 period of european leftism, which in some ways was an even more ideological/political battleground - and something that i thought the film articulated really well in places (ie that great scene in the village square where the audience and filmmakers hash out the clash between radical politics and radical film representation - nice little non-didactic laying out of 'what was at stake'). ok, maybe it's another coming-of-age/coming-of-adult-disillusionment romance, but it looked gorgeous (including all the gorgeous pouting lead performers), the music was spot on throughout (dr strangely strange! and i liked the faux-prog gig in purple), i was sold on all the fire imagery (burning corso's 'gasoline' as an act of remembrance) and its sun-stroked sense of drift (from country to country, lover to lover). i have also stayed at that incredible palatial youth hostel in venice and was stunned to see it featured in the film (tho' i did notice an out-of-period electronic indicator on a london underground scene)

and the lead actor dude was totally laughing, never mind smiling, in that terrif scene abt simenon and maigret

youth hostel in FLORENCE

Maybe someone else can watch for that--I remember him as being irritated in that scene, not amused. I honestly don't remember him ever breaking out of that one flat, neutral expression he had the whole way. Which sometimes can work for me--Anzavour in Don't Shoot the Piano Player--but usually doesn't. I remember even Anzavour wryly smiling at times, though, or even someone like Hackman in The Conversation.

Don't mean to fixate on that one point. Three things I liked: the bonfire party made me nostalgic for that time in my life when I drugged and drank and didn't care; the elliptical ending was nice; and the Kevin Ayers song, which I've identified as "Decadence" from '73 or so.

and the lead actor dude was totally laughing, never mind smiling, in that terrif scene abt simenon and maigret

Terrific when you think of the relationship between cinema and TV, its almost as if Assayas was wanting to put across how wrong he was about what his father was up to? (guessing this is part-autobiog) and of course when you think about how cinephilia went to hell to today where its wall-to-wall HBO. You see that scene and think to the awful Bradshaw rev in The Guardian where he knocks it for nostalgia and you think wtf was he watching. It is nostalgia, but in scenes like this there are no illusions.

re: music, Beefheart's Abba Zaba was nice to hear, liked that he wasn't that bothered to aargh 'soundtrack' the early 70s.

Ward Fowler otm

Yeah

Forgot the flipping-through-records scene--obviously an homage to Almost Famous. (Yes, kidding.) That was great.

The Slant review gets at some of the reasons why the film fell short for me.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/something-in-the-air

Gilles and Christine are relatively bland, albeit pretty, ciphers...the film, enveloping as it is, proves woefully short on burning dramatic or thematic intensity.

I don't know that I needed burning intensity, but something along that road would have helped. I love Carlos.

Richard Brody didn't like it.

I did.

he's kind of a chameleon, in terms of the thematics and subject matter of his films. something about his body of work feels modish--not as obviously or as crassly as, like, gus van sant or tsai ming liang or something, but just like he's making films to be cool or something. i know that's not a very sophisticated criticism. he just doesn't seem to have a recognizably original approach, and he ends up doing the same boring handheld camera thing for most of his films. i admit seeing "irma vep" twice--when it came out, and then about four years ago--and didn't "get" it either time... by which i mean, didn't get what critics seemed to feel was so startlingly original or incisive about it. it felt like he was making the film _for_ critics, in a way, and thus everything kind of reduced to this low-frequency feedback loop.

i admit i kind of put him and arnaud desplechin in the same box in my mind, though i recognize that he's probably a more interesting filmmaker than desplechin (whose films i mostly cannot stand).

my mom really liked summer hours.

i really liked cold water and, to a lesser extent, carlos.

also the poll skipped a few of his features, no? or maybe just désordre (which I haven't seen)?

how do you pronounce his name, anyway? ah-say-ahz?

he ends up doing the same boring handheld camera thing for most of his films.

disagree? At some point in his last three films his camera will lose interest in people and note these people's interaction with the environment. It's quite moving. He's probably my favorite living director, which sounds more pretentious than I intend.

Where Brody is hopelessly wrong is noting how Assayas is modish in the best sense: his characters have lived through the allusions they make to literature, film, poli sci, etc.

There are some lovely camera movements around the French countryside, then iirc, those crane shots are mirrored in the last scene in the studio as they are making a film-within-a-film.

Gilles and Christine are relatively bland, albeit pretty, ciphers...the film, enveloping as it is, proves woefully short on burning dramatic or thematic intensity.

They were young, enthusiastic and waywardly trying - and that to varying degrees? Besides, to have a film showing a kind of "drama of their times" when you look around today n Europe - where it seems little has changed, or that there is so much left to change - would be simply wrong.

Only Assayas and Denis come out with anything that happens to be both French and worth seeing.

saw this a couple of days ago, and really liked it. tho it's decades earlier, i kept seeing certain friends or myself in gilles, & i thought of a young hoos more than once. sexy dark-eyed anarchists are still out there trying to deal with maoists & trotskyites, god love em.

christine dealing with her partner's conflation of feminists with lesbians! u know she has to do her activist work and then take care of everything else while the men talk. that shit is often elided when we look back like this, and since early the film had shown girls were well-represented in the lycee movement, this was a strong & kind of necessary scene to me.

when her & gilles meet on a street at night post-break up & stand close together having one of those conversations u have when there's enough distance to evaporate ill feeling but not enough to deaden all the other stuff, you can see the attraction flashing back & forth between them. when she says "you know i always liked all your stuff" her voice wavers and her love wells up like something tangible.

but gilles has a thing for laure that feels in the nature of a first love; laure who looked cold-eyed at his work, rejecting this, selecting that. i wondered what it meant that his most representational art was of christine.

something else going on in that scene with christine when he points out they took liberties with his work. it's not just the complaints and depreciations of a young person praised for an example of limited success, but of a kind with the gels for the band & the ridiculous british film. tho the camera lingers on their creativity, they are disappointments woefully short of society re-imagined.

even tho there is so much talk of form and style in the film, i seem to have been too interested in the melieu & characters to notice the film's own technique. but it didn't seem at all similar to the hand-held restlessness of irma vep, which often produced dramatic close-up off-centre framings. even when i noticed laure moving around the party in an extended take with lots of camera movement, she's fully in frame or caught in mid-shot, and the shot is stately and dreamy, which is probably how her last hit felt.

http://logger.believermag.com/post/53036565653/bringing-your-ghosts-to-life-interview-with-film

On Assayas' remake of The bitter Tears of Petra von Kant: http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2014/10/9/nyff-maria-dances-on-the-mountain-tops.html

clouds of sils maria was p good

I watch it tomorrow.

stoked to see, love this guy

yes, stoked for the madness.

I liked it quite a bit more the second time I saw it, but I don't think I'll ever be a big Assayas fan.

Did not even know about this. Like the Film Experience blog post above says, I love Assayas, Binoche and Petra von Kant, so I am favorably disposed. Can totally see Binoche in that role.

should I have seen pvk before seeing this

I should really get around to it anyway

Everyone should see PVK! It's great.

ya but do I need to have

iyo

I haven't seen the Assayas, so I don't know. Probably be interesting to compare the two no matter what order you see them in.

i doubt there's a strong stylistic similarity

Affecting, and in the last half hour shrewd. Assayas' use of a Rohmer-indebted natural wonder as conceit and structural framework is better than his leaden dialogue, which often sounds like Woody Allen thinks his intellectuals in the eighties sound like. Stewart is never not boring.

ya but do I need to have

― nults of 2 ppl don't amount to a will have beens in this crazy (wins),

No. This turned out to be a publicity MacGuffin.

was v impressed by its world creation, & also what it withholds -- ie the "new" pages of the play & what binoche's perf of the younger role was like

Are we ready for spoiler-discussions of this film? I have a biggie I want to ask about.

Go for it.

saw Mia Hansen-Love's Eden recently, and was struck by how reminiscent it was of Something In The Air. In fact it's basically the same film with the (in)action transposed to the French house scene in the 90s/00s

I was grousing about this to my viewing companion who slightly blew my mind when he told me that she and Assayas are married

Ok. SPOILER WARNING!

Does Valentine kill herself? The first time I saw it, I just thought that she waited a bit, and then left the other way, but right before she dissapears, she and Maria discuss the ending of 'Maloja Snake' and how Helena's suicide is never shown, but just intuited because the actress disappears from the stage. And more to that, what happens between Valentine and the photographer? There are hints of something really dark going on with Val, which nobody seems to bother figuring out, while every little detail of Jo-Ann's life is blown-up and magnified.

I thought it was an Antonioni-esque reminder of Valentine's unimportance. She's an employee. She can be replaced at any time. She may have died, wandered off, who knows.

I didn't care much about her fling w/the photographer -- not enough information.

Jo-Ann's novelist boyfriend? Rowr.

you probably wnted to read an analysis of this film AND Furious 7 in the context of poptimism, right?

http://filmcomment.com/entry/bombast-pop-pop-pop-popular

LOL at that:

I detect something like the language which has been used in the discussion around the by-no-means-new issue of rockism vs. poptimism, one of the defining dichotomies of the last decade of pop writing. To recap: the rockist is a devotee of small-band guitar/bass/drum music; he is also, the grievance goes, usually a “he,” and touts the authenticity of the music that he listens to over that of the poptimists. The poptimist is open to various pop/hip-hop/electro/R&B/dance idioms which invite an ethnically diverse/female/LBGTQ fan base, idioms dismissed as synthetic by the rockists who, until relatively recently, at least, held all of the most important positions in music journalism.

Don't they teach anything at school these days!

I live in fucking envy of ppl who need the recap

whoa nice

Mess of a piece.

tl;dr but how many Furious films are better than Nick Jonas?

I still think Boarding Gate is really underrated, the sense of movement is so thrilling (same as in Demonlover I suppose)

Watched the early short film Laissé inachevé à Tokyo with Elli Medeiros - the plot is kind of nothing (bored author goes to Japan and gets involved with/escapes from gangsters, told non-linearly) but it's absolutely beautiful to look at and well worth 20 minutes of your time.

omg demonlover

beyond description, a thriller that barely has a story and if there is one its plot movements only occur only in the unconscious senses, in diffracted reflections, in the cold light droning from computer screens, also contains tentacle hentai and gimp outfits, the best movie ever made

like an episode of succession that gradually wanders into a dennis cooper novel

loved watching the power relationships in this film invert and revert and spiderweb with the film barely remarking on it at all

It's a hell of a trip, that film.

It deserved a couple votes.

Kind of want to watch Carlos again, the cinema version, never saw the miniseries, maybe will finally watch Demonlover first.

Maybe I did watch Demonlover before but have forgotten it, so another reason to watch.

Recommend the whole Carlos series! I enjoyed the immersion.

Indeed. A real kick.

Not easy to stream it, unfortunately.

can't believe you hadn't watched demonlover, brad

now go see boarding gate next!!

started from the bottom
now we're here

dreamlover on Criterion Channel!

er Demonlover

Finally watched Something in the Air after meaning to forever. Very much enjoyed it, I thought it was charming and evocative. Traffics in a certain level of nostalgic romanticism, but that's OK with me. I'm kind of a sucker for that whole era.

Have you seen Cold Water? It's like a blueprint for Something in the Air, and--I think--much better.

No, it's also been on the mean-to list for a while. I should.