Les Amants Reguliers: a review
Last night, on the train back to Trieste from Lido di Venezia and its International Movie Festival, I swore to myself that I would have ever said no further words about the movie I had just seen, Les amantes reguliers, directed by the french Philippe Garrel. All I had to say I already told Mr. Leigh, who shared with me the pain of fifteen euros wasted and a rush in the pouring rain to catch the last Vaporetto. However, this morning I bought the Italian newspaper La Repubblica and I happened to read a brief review of the movie, signed by Natalia Aspesi. The severe irritation this caused to my nerves pushed me to spend a few more words over the matter.
This review was a manifest celebration of the movie, for its sublime use of black and white, for its lovely young actors with young faces of innocent revolutionaries and libertarian poets “who had the dream of not becoming famous”. Mrs. Aspesi asserts that, before being seen, this three hour long movie that deals with the negleted ’68 french riots, something already erased from the mind of most people, cannot sound appealing to any audience. Nevertheless, the great skill of the french director in telling “a nostalgic tail of times that were nice and vivid despite the violence”, glued the astonished audience to their seats during the whole movie, especially the disilluded young, “who look at those events just as fairy tails”.
What is that all about, Mrs. Aspesi?
In the movie there is no kind of explanation of the historical context in which all that occurred, neither in the scenes nor in the thin dialogues, if we exclude some headlines from newspapers of that time. All one can see in this film is a meaningless and endless sequence of fights between some middle class youngsters, apparently busy in smoking hashish with the same dedication shown in burning cars, and the impotent french policemen. I conclude that the movie was plainly intended to target an audience made of people already aware of the facts and their complexity. By saying this I make the assumption events must have been more complex. In particular, I assume the political ideas forwared by the protesters were more articulated concerning their goals. Based on what the movie tells, they were not interested in any real or realizable goal. For this reason Garrel and Mrs. Aspesi who refused to highlight the cracks of this film, share the moral responsibility of being indulgent with a political movement that promoted gratuitous violence and hatred.
This review was a manifest celebration of the movie, for its sublime use of black and white, for its lovely young actors with young faces of innocent revolutionaries and libertarian poets “who had the dream of not becoming famous”. Mrs. Aspesi asserts that, before being seen, this three hour long movie that deals with the negleted ’68 french riots, something already erased from the mind of most people, cannot sound appealing to any audience. Nevertheless, the great skill of the french director in telling “a nostalgic tail of times that were nice and vivid despite the violence”, glued the astonished audience to their seats during the whole movie, especially the disilluded young, “who look at those events just as fairy tails”.
What is that all about, Mrs. Aspesi?
In the movie there is no kind of explanation of the historical context in which all that occurred, neither in the scenes nor in the thin dialogues, if we exclude some headlines from newspapers of that time. All one can see in this film is a meaningless and endless sequence of fights between some middle class youngsters, apparently busy in smoking hashish with the same dedication shown in burning cars, and the impotent french policemen. I conclude that the movie was plainly intended to target an audience made of people already aware of the facts and their complexity. By saying this I make the assumption events must have been more complex. In particular, I assume the political ideas forwared by the protesters were more articulated concerning their goals. Based on what the movie tells, they were not interested in any real or realizable goal. For this reason Garrel and Mrs. Aspesi who refused to highlight the cracks of this film, share the moral responsibility of being indulgent with a political movement that promoted gratuitous violence and hatred.
posted by Bojan Krcic at
5:29 AM
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