Critics reviews

Both films are set in the relatively recent French past: Blue is the Warmest Colour in the early 2000s, Après maiin 1971, three years after the 1968 protests. But a major determinant inBlue is the Warmest Colour – class – is fudged in Après mai¬, and points to a difference between the two works and arguably accounts for Assayas' lack of bite.

This film's gentler style of fragmentation feels entirely appropriate to the business of recollection at a distance. And, in both visual and sonic terms, from the patterns of the tie-dye T-shirts to the whine of the prog-rock synths, Assayas has recreated the styles of the period in a way that, for once, isn't distorted by retrospective irony, but is tenderly rather than reverently spot-on – in des images justes.

Such ambition, such balance, such forbearance. It's highly laudable work from Assayas and it's not surprising if, at times, the film can seem, superficially, either meandering or coldly distant. Let's just say Gilles is indeed meandering and the movie is touchingly true to that... [Something in the Air] is an exhilarating and demanding film that is as full of interesting conflicts and contradictions as its protagonist.

It's a captivating and fresh snapshot of a well-documented time... Free of nostalgia and not overly critical in hindsight, it captures the immediacy of youth in hugely endearing fashion.

In one sense Something in the Air can be viewed as an inversion of its predecessor. The protagonist of Carlos uses politics and persuasion to lure young, passionate people into a radical movement; when his followers see that he prizes his ego over ethics and ideology, they break away from him. By contrast the main character of Something in the Air strays from left-wing activism once he recognizes the movement's flaws.

Assayas looks back on the values and priorities of the time with a vision that's both wry and tender. When Gilles asks a member of a radical collective if he can borrow their 16mm camera to make a short film, he's told: "We do agit-prop. Usually we don't lend for fiction." It's a line that crystallizes the tension between aesthetics and politics underlying almost every interaction.

In tracking its main character's journey from revolutionary to artist, the film also suggests more than a little of Assayas's own origin story, as well as an affirmation of his strengths as an auteur of memory, of the way that the past—be it political, personal, or cinematic—may, through cinema, be depicted, debunked and reinvented all at once.

The film is an exemplar of a new "Tradition of Quality," of a bien-pensant but mal-imaginant sophistication. In lieu of original creative energy, it offers a complacent sincerity peopled with dewy, modelish youths and adorned with markers of a political, literary, and artistic culture that it doesn't explore or examine or transform at all but, rather, displays as part of a living museum of a storied time.

The great thing about "Something in the Air" is that the movie makes the thrill of that brief but all-encompassing rupture [France's May '68 riots] apparent without sentimentality or even (excessive) nostalgia.

It's a crystallized, incisive portrait of the decay of youth, when interests narrow, often latching onto something one never expected. For Gilles, it's working on a nudie monster movie set on a submarine. For others it may be different.

It's a terrific film, wonderfully atmospheric and alive, but also a curiously appropriate one to encounter right now, as we deal with the aftermath of a cruel and pointless crime apparently committed in the name of some abstract revolutionary ideal.

In Something in the Air, that past—a version of Assayas's own—is rendered in visuals so specific and evocative, it's perpetually alive. In one sequence, Gilles and his friends—including two nerdy guys and two gloriously topless women—zip across the lake in a borrowed speedboat, all bathed in sunlight. It's like a late-20th-century version of Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass). They've got a groovy kind of love.