Something in the Air (2012)
Directed by Olivier Assayas
During the 1970s a student named Gilles gets entangled in contemporary political turmoils although he would rather just be a creative artist. While torn between his solidarity to his friends and his personal ambitions he falls in love with Christine.
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What critics compared Something in the Air to
What "Something in the Air" has that "No" doesn't, however, are beautiful young people (hello, Carole Combes and Lola Créton), sometimes in states of undress, although the nudity never becomes the movie's raison d'être, as it sometimes seemed to in Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 film inspired by the 1968 Paris student riots, "The Dreamers."
Not having seen the first movie, I can't offer a comparison of the two, though the pretty actors and counterculture nostalgia kept reminding me of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers.
But — like the similar, stronger "The Dreamers" — it does capture the high emotionalism of a very specific point in a person's life, where the magnitude of the injustices around you is surpassed only by the firm belief that you and your friends alone know an easy way to end them.
Of course, Gilles is a stand-in for Assayas, who is a former film critic, so there's a wholeness to the movie's conception, a sense that his sensibility is shining through in every frame — though compared to the operatic fever-dream of Bernardo Bertolucci's daring, transgressive, NC-17-rated " The Dreamers " (2003), it's pretty tepid stuff.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s 2003 film “The Dreamers,” set three years earlier, covered much the same ground — love, cinema, revolution — with about 50 times as much color and passion.
As the daughter, Justine (Lola Créton, of Goodbye First Love and Something In The Air), recovers from her physical and mental trauma, and her mother, Sandra (Julie Bataille), sinks into despair, help arrives in the musky form of Sandra’s brother Marco (Denis favorite Vincent Lindon), a ship’s captain who cashes out his savings and leaves his old life behind.
These two incidents are linked and Naval Captain Marco Silvestri (Vincent Lindon, "La Moustache," "Mademoiselle Chambon") gives up his post to return to Paris and to help his distraught widowed sister Sandra (Julie Bataille, "Paris, je t'aime") and his abused niece Justine (Lola Créton, "Bluebeard," "Something in the Air").
Olivier Assayas’s valentine to the early ’70s, “ Something in the Air ,” re-creates the textures of the director’s student days in France: the rock and roll, the tie dye, the Maoist nuttiness.