(Originally written May 28, 2007)

“I entered this world on the Champs Elysees in 1959, and my very first words were, ‘New York Herald Tribune!’”

I was about to go to bed when I saw this film on the Independent Film Channel. I decided to watch the first few minutes to get a sense of what this film is like, but once I had started, I couldn’t stop watching.

This is one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen, a film so in love with the great cinema of the past. It’s a love letter to the 1960s, a letter that expresses mixed sentiments—the joy of the ideals and the reality of how these ideals stand up against reality. The film is about an American student who spends his time at the Cinematheque and eventually meets French twins who are passionate about politics, music, sex, and, most of all, movies. Never have I seen a film capture what it means to love cinema as well this film with the three characters in the film quizzing each other about movie references and living out the movies they love. The movie even makes use of actual footage from the referenced movies which include City Lights, Queen Christina, Freaks, and Breathless. Perhaps the most memorable scene is when the three characters run through the Louvre, attempting to break the record the characters set in Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders. After they break the record, Bob Dylan’s “Queen Jane Approximately” came in, and that’s when I lost it. It was a representation of everything I had ever loved about film. Foreign cinema can sometimes become distant for an American, but this film gives a different perspective because the characters have such a beautiful personal connection to the films they watch and love. The movie eventually goes on to question the idealism of the twins and evaluate these characters in the context of 1960s France, the protests and the calls for revolution. By the end of the film, the values of sexual freedom and political radicalism of the characters are put into question, as if these were part of a dream that eventually ended. More than anything, this movie is simply a joy to watch, exuding the energy that characterized the films of the French New Wave. A great movie allows me to not only enjoy myself, but it also allows me to be excited about movies as an art again, and that is exactly what this film did.