Venice Film Festival: Olivier Assayas Returns to the 1970s

September 6, 2012, 2:10 pm

By DENNIS LIM

VENICE - In his previous movie, “Carlos,” the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas tackled a few big themes of the 1970s - the demise of idealism and the rise of terrorism - through a biopic of the international guerrilla and media star known as Carlos the Jackal. Mr. Assayas's new film, “Something in the Air,” which had its world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival, is another immersion in those tumultuous times, but from a very personal perspective. (The film is also being shown at the Toronto and New York festivals, and will be released in the United States by IFC.)

As the film's French title, “Apres Mai” (“After May”), suggests, it takes place after the seminal French protes ts of May 1968. The film is born of the same autobiographical impulse as Mr. Assayas's 2002 book, “A Post-May Adolescence,” a memoir in the form of a letter addressed to Alice Debord, the widow of the French social critic Guy Debord, and a life-changing figure for the young Mr. Assayas. (The Austrian Filmmuseum has just published an English-language translation.)

The protagonists of “Something in the Air,” which opens in 1971, are high school students, too young to have participated in the seismic protests but swept up in its aftermath nonetheless. Unfolding as a series of romantic entanglements, political awakenings and artistic discoveries, the film touches on themes familiar from any number of movies about the end of the '60s and the end of adolescence. But it also strikes a balance - fond but clear-eyed, fetishistic in its attention to period detail yet devoid of sentimentality.

Mr. Assayas spoke about his new film and his attitude toward the 1970s i n an interview here this week. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation:

When I interviewed you about your 2008 film “Summer Hours” you said you “hated nostalgia” and were reluctant to make autobiographical films. Were those sentiments you had to fight in making “Something in the Air,” which draws on your own early-'70s adolescence?

I still do hate nostalgia in a sense, and I'm not nostalgic about the 1970s. It's a period that was always either ridiculed or fantasized, and both perspectives are wrong, obviously. The '70s were complex and also horrible in many ways. At some point, the weight of the ideology, the political newspeak, was just unbearable, and I was glad when it was over. But still, there was a sense of freedom, a sense that everything was open. The '70s in the end were like a laboratory for the following decades.

What reconnected me first with the 1970s was writing the book [“A Post-May Adolescence”], where I kind of reconstructed my relationship to those times and revived them in many ways. But I think the way “Carlos” was received kind of gave me space to get a movie like this financed. The fact that “Carlos” was so big, so complex, forced me to expand my way of filming, my way of telling stories. Most movies you construct on a few ideas, a few strong concepts. In “Carlos” I had to use every possible trick to sustain the interest during such an absurdly long span of time. I felt I had learned new ways of approaching cinema in “Carlos” and I wanted to try them out with a more intimate subject matter.

What about the connection between “Something in the Air” and your 1994 film “Cold Water,” which is set in the same period? The lead characters in both films have the same names, Gilles and Christine, and there's a party scene in the new film that recalls a well-known sequence from “Cold Water.”

That film was an essential moment in terms of my filmma king, but it left me also a little frustrated. I felt I had not dealt with elements from the ‘70s that were essential because that was a more abstract film, a more poetic take on the period.

“Something in the Air” is very specific in showing us the books, records, films and art works that are important to the characters, and were, I assume, important to you.

Those elements are so important because, of course, this was before the communication age. In the '70s we did not trust the bourgeois media, meaning the mainstream press, TV, radio, so the way of communicating was through the free press, through underground records, cartoons, whatever. They became very fetishized because they were what connected you to like-minded kids all over the world - you had a sense that elsewhere other kids were part of the same parallel counterculture. To me it was extremely important to get this right.

How conscious were you of working within certain frameworks - au tobiography, period piece - that often present traps?

It was traps everywhere [laughs]. It was like walking in the jungle and not knowing exactly where to put your foot. It's a very difficult balance when you're re-creating, especially that period. I had to tone down some of my memories. Even people reading the screenplay were just laughing at some of it: the politics, the mysticism, the relationship to Eastern philosophy. We've grown so used to making fun of those times - you just give a tiny push in one direction and people think you're making fun of the period.

I did not want to do that but I didn't want to get it wrong either because that dimension did exist. I had to find the right perspective, where obviously there is some irony but at the same time I'm taking my characters seriously - they are not any more ridiculous than any kind of geek today. The other trap was being too specific in trying to control too much the re-creation of the period and not givi ng enough breathing space to the actors.

Could you say a bit about the casting? With the exception of Lola Créton [the star of “Goodbye First Love,” the recent film by Mr. Assayas's partner, Mia Hansen-Love], none of the young cast members had acted before.

I was looking more for artists than for actors. Each of them is an aspiring artist, and they have a notion of what it is to relate to being part of a generation and also to have a very specific path - this personal discovery that is the path of artists. Even if they did not have a complete grasp of the politics of the '70s, at least they would understand the basics about the characters.

I never really tried to explain to them how to speak, how to act, how to identify with those times. I kind of trusted that if I put them in a setting that is basically the 1970s, they will instantly understand the context. That helped preserve the spontaneity. You start with autobiography, you use elements from you r perception of the world, your own memory, but obviously it's a film, so it takes you elsewhere. What you see in the film is not Olivier Assayas at 15, it's [the actor] Clément Métayer. And whatever his face says, whatever his body language says, it's much stronger than what I've written.