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June 02, 2007

Regular Lovers

Smoldering Oldies

By Andrew

It's May Fuckin' 68 in Paris: hot town, pigs in the city, but the streets belong to the people -- and 20 year-old poet that he is, Francois has had a busy night of barricade building and cobblestone throwing. "Comrades!" He yells. "This car! Overturn this car here!" And they do it. They fucking do it.

If you don't know about May 1968 in Paris -- why the streets saw fighting for the first time since WWII, why the workers struck and why the color of the air was red with revolution -- Phillipe Garrel's 2005 Regular Lovers (Les Amants reguliers) isn't about to explain to you what's really going on. Lovers lacks details -- all details -- but what it lacks in cold, hard information it makes up for in hot, impassioned imagery.

At first, what Garrel accomplishes is nothing short of amazing: the recreation of a revolutionary generation filmed in sharp silhouettes against the flames of burning cars in a way that never becomes trite or cliche. Regular Lovers is filmed in black and white, but the ideas are anything but.

The entire first hour is all sensory. Early on, Francois rushes up a stairwell, flush with energy, and gushes to a friend a story about a Molotov cocktail he was too nervous to throw. "Here, smell my hand! Smell the gasoline." We in the audience, we can smell it too. And when the young Francois beats cheeks, a legion of riot cops in hot pursuit, it's enough to make one yell -- as the students scrawled on those walls of May -- "Run comrade! The old world is behind you!"

But what if the old world was not only behind Francois, but beside him, in front of him, completely surrounding him, and by extension, his whole generation? How boring, bleak, and downright sad that would be. Regular Lovers spends the next two hours (of three hours total) begging the question. '68 was a year, and May a month, and the year turns to '69 -- Garrell indicates it with plaques serving as inter-titles -- and then age sets in, the inescapable old world of age.

And how downright boring, bleak and downright sad it is, ad nauseum. Francois and his male band of supporting characters -- artists and revolutionaries the lot of them -- all meet ladies, and all move in with a sole benefactor, an apathetic heir whose drug of choice is opium. If revolutionary flames become embers, and embers ashes, this rich bourgeois is caching them into an ashtray on his bedside table.

It is at this point that Regular Lovers becomes regular, all half-scenes and no plot. It finally adds a few female characters; otherwise, it never improves. A brief summary of any point in the film's last two hours: Character wanders across a room, quotes Mahkno. Cut. Character lights a pipe, rolls over, says a few words to a friend or lover. Cut. Character tells friend how good their sex life is. Cut... your wrist in boredom.

It is almost enough to bring to mind a certain anarchist adage, proclaimed a few years ago by that romantic clique CrimethInc: Your politics are boring as fuck, or rather, in this instance, Your movie is boring as fuck. CrimethInc conjectured that politics grow stale and sectarian because the fun has been wrung from them -- "Join us in making the 'revolution' a game," they invite, "a game played for the highest stakes of all, but a joyous, carefree game nonetheless!" And after the first hour, Regular Lovers is no fun at all.

But the irony is the story behind Regular Lovers is all idealism, all romance, at base the stuff of any quintessential CrimethInc tract (the latest thInc website even cribs from May 1968 in its headline: "Don't look back comrade, the old websites are behind you.."). Romance and idealism, it turns out, can all be pretty dull too, especially as they undergo a slow death -- and if they're tied to youth, as in Regular Lovers, they're always dying because they're always aging. In other words, life can't be one long, permanent orgasm -- at some point all that fucking is going to give way to responsibilities, like kids maybe.

Garret all knows this; it might even be the one great principle behind Regular Lovers, the film's saving grace. His characters never have kids of their own, but it is made clear, early on, that they are the children of someone. Midway between the end of the riots and the two-hour long dreadful stretch of tedium that follows, Garret includes a sequence in which all the youngsters return home, filthy and dog-tired after a long night of street fighting. After urging him to bed to rest, a mother picks up her sons mud-caked boots to clean them. Instantly, we realize it doesn't matter how many miles these boots have traveled in their flights from the police. In a single gesture, we know the revolution won't win because the students -- all so young, and so male -- hardly have people like their mothers in mind.

So the revolution of Regular Lovers is tempered, burdened with responsibility to think beyond the confines of immediate experience. Tempered, but also sobered: after three long hours, it's hard to have few illusions about romance and idealism. Yet never is the revolution condemned -- the very question of it is the thing that makes Lovers worth watching.

Boring as fuck, sure, but artistic as fuck too. Unlike youth, Regular Lovers could possibly, maybe -- and should, in my opinion -- endure. Because I can't forget that first hour; I can't forget May. I once had PTSD-induced dreams of riots rather regularly, and they were never this beautiful, nor this solemn; no matter, Regular Lovers's riots are still the stuff of dreams, long-takes with a tinge of the other-worldly that can't help but bring to my mind Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies. And every gesture has something of Robert Bresson to it -- an indication of something offscreen, but this time no Gods, no Masters.

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