Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel, 2005)
It took Philippe Garrel over 30 years to excise his experience of May ‘68 in Regular Lovers, his three hour masterpiece from 2005. Shot in lush, high-contrast black and white by Rivette’s regular cinematographer, William Lubtchansky, and starring Garrel’s own son Louis as a directorial stand-in, the film is a quietly devastating anachronism, an object meticulously and lovingly styled to recreate the past armed with the defeatism of our modern understanding of post-’68 France. While a more contemporaneous response to the riots like the similarly epic The Mother and the Whore depicted curdled idealism through non-stop, literally sickening dialogue, Garrel’s evocation of the period is often silent, a tender, plangent remembrance of the uncertainty and possibility of youth.
Ideas of compromise feature in Regular Lovers’ opening scene, before the film’s premise is even announced. Initially introducing Francois and a few fellow revolutionaries as silhouettes haunting the Parisian cityscapes, we open on Francois and a friend discussing their art. Francois debates whether or not he should sell his poetry, while his friend declares that his grand ambition is to become a decorator. “I feel like I would be betraying something, but I don’t know what” Francois says, before Garrel drops the characters into an hourlong recreation of a barricade protest.
In essence, the film is a slow lament at these revolutionaries’ capitulation to larger society, the death of the spirit of May’ 68 via a (partially) self-inflicted haze of drugs, sex, and capital. Initially, Garrel takes great steps to depict Francois and his colleagues as nonentities, swirling smoke in front of their faces during the nocturnal protest, and covering their faces with soot such that when day breaks, their identities are still indiscernible. This initial hour is astounding. It sustains heart-pounding action while the methodical, romantic cinematography and naturalistic use of ambient noise maintain a grounded realism. The sequence is punctuated by a scene where the protestors are dressed in Greco-Roman robes, their valiant demonstration a mythical one of classical beauty.
What follows Garrel’s bravura barricade sequence is near-catatonia. As Francois and his friends hide out in a wealthy friends’ family mansion, they spend the following years smoking opium, lounging in silence, and embarking on relationships, the characters’ squandering of the revolutionary moment perhaps best represented by a pointed 69 joke to denote the passage of time (I readily admit that part of my appreciation for this film derives from its clear influence on Bertrand Bonello). The film exists in an ambiguous stupor, and as the characters slowly lose hope, Garrel demarcates their compromise first through a shot of Francois peeing on the base of a bronze statue, and then through one of Francois’ girlfriend, destroying an ancient-looking sculpture in her studio.
Even as Garrel is remarkably self-critical and clear-eyed about the failures of its young protagonists, Regular Lovers is also almost unbearably tender towards them. At various points, Garrel stops the film in its tracks to hold on close ups of each of the characters, as if to preserve them at this ideological turning point, when anything still seemed possible. Elsewhere, he injects anachronistic autobiographical elements, such as the use of a Nico song (Garrel dated Nico in the 70s, and that relationship, in conjunction with her heroin overdose, are the subject of Garrel’s film I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar), or a late-film homage to Akerman’s News From Home (Akerman and Garrel were reportedly good friends). A swooning dance sequence is set to The Kinks’ This Time Tomorrow (released just after the events of the film, in 1970). It’s a fatalist, ecstatic needle drop (it’s clearly an inspiration for Bonello’s use of Nights in White Satin in House of Pleasures), set to a song that that feels chosen primarily for its personal resonance with Garrel. In these maneuvers, Garrel elevates Regular Lovers from a first-rate film about May ‘68 to a monumental one that movingly seeks to recapture the feeling of his formative years.