A youthful movie in more ways than one, Olivier Assayas’s “Something in the Air” evokes an irretrievable past even as it manages to embody the total excitement of a particular historical moment and even, self-reflexively, the trajectory of the French director’s career. This quasi-autobiographical evocation of student politics and European hippie counterculture circa 1971 is also a crypto sequel or perhaps a prequel to “Cold Water,” the extended party movie with which Assayas made his reputation in the mid ’90s.
“Something in the Air” (which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday) breaks from the gate with a burst of youthful action. That “something” in the first scene is definitely tear-gas, as militant students confront riot-helmeted, club-wielding cops in the streets of Paris. Violent confrontations segue to chaotic political meetings, guerrilla graffiti blitzes and poster plasterings, as well as further political manifestations — with unexpected consequences. Activity is constant, as is romance: “Something in the Air” spins off enough subplots to stock a TV miniseries or at least a movie as long as Assayas’s previous period piece, “Carlos.” It’s also a virtual museum of sacred talismans, most obviously the casual display of ancient Anglo-American rock LPs.
Despite two love affairs and a stretch of time on the lam, Assayas’s alter-ego (a would-be painter and part-time anarchist) is considerably less vivid than the milieu through which he moves. This quality of being overshadowed by events is one he shares with most of the movie’s other characters, despite the erotic spells they may cast on each other. Individuals are swept away less by their emotions than by the collective energy of the international youth underground, casually dropping acid and earnestly singing Phil Ochs songs, firebombing les flics, casting the I Ching, and then abruptly decamping for Kabul. More than anything else, “Something in the Air” dramatizes the filmmaker’s memories of what the period felt like.
In the course of book-length letter Assayas addressed to Alice Debord (widow of the famed Situationist Guy Debord), recently translated into English and published by the Austrian Film Museum as “A Post-May Adolescence,” the 57-year-old director passionately defends the ideals of his generational cohort, noting that “the absurdities of this era and its fashions, even if they get recycled in stylized versions here and there, are only too obvious, and the world has mocked them ever since, usually in the name of nothing particularly worthy.” And yet:
Those picturesque appearances were nothing but a clear, concise and explicit way of breaking with the dominant social system, of cutting ties with the Old by reflecting back an image, disagreeable to it: long hair, beards, filth, Afghan coats, bells, whatever... It’s difficult to explain to anyone of the same age today that it wasn’t just a look or a fashion, not even a movement. It was an act of rupture involving the whole person: rejection of materialism, rejection of work, rejection of established values, especially the values of education, career, status, success, money, and family.
The great thing about “Something in the Air” is that the movie makes the thrill of that brief but all-encompassing rupture apparent without sentimentality or even (excessive) nostalgia.