Something in the Air

Director: Olivier Assayas, Olivier Assayas, Olivier Assayas, Olivier Assayas, Olivier Assayas, Olivier Assayas, Olivier Assayas, Olivier Assayas

2012 / 122min / 35mm

Assayas vividly, immediately conjures the world of his youth—the heady enthusiasms for radical politics, parties, and rock ’n’ roll of his post-May ’68 teenage years—in this largely autobiographical memory piece, which follows Assayas’s onscreen alter ego Gilles (Clément Métayer), a philosophy student in Paris, from youthful activism into disillusion, through a wrenching love affair with Lola Créton’s Christine, and finally to the brink of a new vocation in the cinema. Éric Gautier’s radiant open-air photography and Assayas’s loving attention to the textures of the era combine to create a breathlessly present period piece.