Gilles is looking for romance, even as he’s looking for the sense of belonging that’s conferred by hanging out with cool kids. It’s the one that everyone goes through in the process of growing up. A perfect subtitle for the film might be “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.”īut the real revolution that Assayas is talking about isn’t political. Gilles and Christine get together after the accidental wounding of a security guard - during a night of vandalism and Molotov cocktails - forces the pair to lie low in Italy for a few months, organizing Italian workers, after graduation. Gilles starts out dating Laure (Carole Combes), only to hook up with Christine (Lola Creton) after Laure dumps him for an older man in London.

The “something” in the air here might be hippie music mixed with pot and tobacco smoke. Most other details seem included for period flavor, of which there is plenty. At least there’s an English-speaking character (India Salvor Menuez) there to explain the song to her French boyfriend (Felix Armand) - and to us. One scene features someone singing a protest song about the obscure American journalist and activist William Worthy, who in the 1960s violated State Department travel restrictions by going to Cuba. It’s never clear whether the movement that Gilles and his pals discuss with such passion is a cause or a pose.Īssayas doesn’t seem to care either, dropping cryptic references to such police organizations as the C.R.S. Although it helps a little if you know what those protests were about - partly workers’ rights, but other forms of liberation, too - it doesn’t really matter. It centers on a stand-in for Assayas: Gilles (Clement Metayer), an aspiring teenage painter, who is, like many of his peers, still halfheartedly caught up in the radical leftist fervor that was awakened in France’s youth by the riots of May 1968. Set in 1971, during and just after senior year for a group of high school friends - a time of transition and new beginnings - the film is about finding oneself. French filmmaker Olivier Assayas’s “Something in the Air,” a semi-autobiographical tale of revolution that manages to feel both shambling and urgent at the same time, takes its title from the 1969 Thunderclap Newman song of the same name, the chorus of which features the line “We have got to get it together now.” The film’s original French title, which translates to “After May,” may help explain the reference.

Something in the air guide