Director: Olivier Assayas
Talent: Clément Métayer, Lola Créton, Felix Armand, Carole Combes
Release Date: 24th May 2013
Olivier Assayas’ semi-autobiographical account of youth counterculture in post-’68 Europe (the film’s original French title is Après mai) picks up where his 1994 feature L’eau froide left off, charting the experiences of disaffected, artistic young folks against a macro-historical backdrop of political unrest. Like Assayas, they eschew political engagement for a pastoral humanism which is nominally countercultural and practically hegemonic. Like Assayas, too, they are fascinated by the allure of “the Orient” (to which the director has made explicit and unironic reference in interview, most recently in this month’s Sight & Sound) and a liberal eclecticism which, counter to the film’s tepid suggestion, 1970s revolutionary movements failed as a (partial) result, rather than in spite, of. Ironic, then, that it is in the very “Orient” which Assayas and his youths find so exotic and beguiling that people’s wars are today being fought in the name of the ideological struggle he so readily abandoned. I’ll tell you what’s in the air, Olivier: bad praxis.
