Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Carlos) delivers a very personal, atmospheric, heady account of growing up as a student radical during the heady summer of 1971 in Paris.
A young painter, interested in becoming a filmmaker, comes to terms with his own artistic ambitions, an on-off love affair and a state in crisis. It’s ambitious, great looking and kinetic with a magnificent rock soundtrack typical of Assayas. But it is the palpable feel for place and time which gives this film its heft.
It’s a wonderfully evocative time capsule which manages to both celebrate youthful idealism while at the same time capturing the sense of compromise which inevitably undermined the potency of the counterculture movement. As the underground aged so its preoccupations shifted from radicalism to getting on and conforming in order to reap the material benefits of life within ‘the system’.
In some ways, this is a companion piece to Assayas’ angrier Carlos the Jackal biopic examining the social mores of his own youth and contrasting them with the harsh realities of post-Summer of Love capitalism.
Yet it’s the scenes of heart-pounding teen graffiti raids, drug fueled partying into the student night and awkward first love which stay with us after the credits roll. Romantic without being sentimental, acutely observed without being judgmental, Something In the Air is the very embodiment of “the personal is the political”.
