Film Screening: 

Something in the Air (Après mai)

(Olivier Assayas, 2012, 122 min, France, French w/ English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

--Introduced by Deborah Reisinger, Romance Studies (Q&A to follow).

Set in the early 1970s, this bracing semi-autobiographical film from Olivier Assayas resists easy nostalgia, focusing instead on the turbulence of one's late teens and early twenties. The writer-director's surrogate is a high-school student named Gilles, who was born too late to take part in the insurrections of May '68 but is still consumed with revolutionary zeal. Over the course of this exceptional coming-of-age tale, Gilles will become disenchanted with the political hair-splitting and inflexible positions of the far-left movements he has devoted himself to, eventually finding a new purpose in painting and cinema.

Playing out against a backdrop of perfect period detail, Something in the Air is the rare film that skillfully operates on both a micro and macro level. While delving deeply into Gilles's private dramas as he tries to define himself as an artist, Assayas never lets us forget that this richly drawn adolescent protagonist is also a player in a much broader historical moment: the era when revolutionary hopes began to splinter and fade.

Cost: Free and Open to the Public

Sponsors: The Center for French and Francophone Studies, the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI), and the Department of Romance Studies. Made possible by support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, the French Ministry of Culture (CNC), the Florence Gould Foundation, the Grand Marnier Foundation, and highbrow entertainment.