Your Company
 

Late August, Early September(Fin août, début septembre)

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

France · 1999
1h 52m
Director Olivier Assayas
Starring Mathieu Amalric, Virginie Ledoyen, François Cluzet, Jeanne Balibar
Genre Drama, Romance

Adrien tells his friend Gabriel that he is terminally ill. This revelation causes Gabriel to reconsider his complicated love life and his jealousy of Adrien's status as a published novelist. The two friends are ultimately brought together by the tragic circumstances.

Stream Late August, Early September

What are people saying?

What are critics saying?

80

TV Guide Magazine by

A beautifully realized tale focusing on an ambitious but unfulfilled group of intellectuals, who react in differing ways to the illness that befalls their mentor, a brilliant writer (Francois Cluzet).

70

Salon by Charles Taylor

Assayas' triumph here is in making sense of confusion and emotional drift -- bringing his characters gently forward into life, and making the film feel full and rounded while still resisting easy resolution.

40

Empire by David Parkinson

Assayas' attempt to present a multi-perspective Polaroid view of Adrien and his circle fall back on the tired technique of abruptly punctuating grainy, handheld sequence with jump cuts. A disappointingly sterotypical French film.

70

Variety by Derek Elley

A kaleidoscopic but engrossing study of the shifting sands of friendship among a group of Parisians, "Late August, Early September" reps a major advance by writer-director Olivier Assayas in warmth and maturity of observation.

70

The New York Times by Janet Maslin

If Assayas doesn't always transport his film's events beyond the all too commonplace, his understatement can also yield moments of quiet simplicity.

75

Boston Globe by Jay Carr

Assayas and his engaged, responsive cast finally beat the odds, subtly and beautifully enabling the film to genuinely seem to be about a handful of friends approaching - not always easily or even gracefully but ultimately very touchingly - the September of their shared and individual lives. [13 Aug 1999, p.D4]

80

Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum

What we don’t know about these characters–and what we don’t see in certain scenes–is often as interesting and as important as what we know and see, and Assayas’s sense of how relationships evolve between people over time is conveyed with a rich and vivid novelistic density.

75

San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle

The film doesn't leave the audience with a moral. It just leaves a sense of having been in the stimulating company of passionate people -- all of them in the arts or on the fringes of that world, all of them struggling to make something intense and amazing out of their lives.

75

The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias

Late August, Early September is a resolutely minor work, a quiet departure from the brash showiness of Irma Vep, but it's crafted with the sure hand of a major director.

Users who liked this film also liked