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Romance for radicals
Regular Lovers
Directed by Phillips Garrel
Certificate 18
FRENCH film-maker Phillipe Garrel was 20 in 1968 which means we should, perhaps, give credence to his point of view concerning the events in Paris that May.
But although Regular Lovers has many moments that make it watchable, in terms of a historical study it offers little.
While he makes a well-shot film, Garrel declines to discuss what May 1968 was about, and what it may or may not have meant to those involved.
Perhaps it is fitting that the film should have a sexual motive as a strong undertone. After all, one of the reasons the May 1968 movement took to the streets came from the implementation of a rule which banned students from visiting each other in single-sex university dormitories.
Francoise, played by the director’s son Louis Garrel, falls in love with artist Lilie (Clotilde Hesme, pictured with Garrel) as they man the barricades, and the film follows their affair as it unravels.
The failure of the students to bring about the desired new world order does not come to the fore. Instead the pair become wrapped up with drug-taking drop-outs and spend their days wandering around in a kind of post-revolutionary hangover.
To Garrel, the student movement lacked direction, and because of this, it doesn’t make for the most fascinating movie, but there are moments where the cinematography is nice enough to mean the sub-title dialogue does not really matter.
Garrel seems not to worry too much about engaging his viewers with a semblance of a plot. Perhaps it is because he was a radical in Paris at the time and is attempting to rekindle memories among those who have shared his experience.
The idea of what the generation of 1968 was all about is broached but Garrel decides they were not up to much: but perhaps this is intentional. Maybe he has decided the students of 1968 did not really know themselves.
Garrel seems to have a less than flattering image of Paris during the time, and it means his film does not add to the beautification of his contemporaries, which could have made a more watchable experience.
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