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France · 2005
3h 3m
Director Philippe Garrel
Starring Louis Garrel, Clotilde Hesme, Nicolas Maury, Caroline Deruas
Genre Drama, Romance
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1968 and 1969 in Paris: during and after the student and trade union revolt. François is 20, a poet, dodging military service. He takes to the barricades, but won't throw a Molotov cocktail at the police. He smokes opium and talks about revolution with his friend, Antoine, who has an inheritance and a flat where François can stay. François meets Lilie, a sculptor who works at a foundry to support herself. They fall in love. A year passes; François continues to write, talk, smoke, and be with Lilie. Opportunities come to Lilie: what will she and François do?
We hate to say it, but we can't find anywhere to view this film.
Regular Lovers evokes the '60s pretty well just through dialogue and rhythm -- better, in fact, than Bernardo Bertolucci's more reverently detailed "The Dreamers." However, the film's slow tempo induces the feeling one is living through the whole of 1968 in one sitting.
Through a haze of opium smoke and Molotov cocktails igniting, Regular Lovers plays out like the heavier politicized and unsentimentalized counterpoint to Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Dreamers."
A magical and supernally beautiful meditative drug-trip head-space picture (a full-fledged ZZM, q.v. above) for which all Euro-film masochists should rearrange their schedules. It'll be out on DVD soon, and that's great. But Garrel's films are almost never seen on the big screen, and this one's worth it.
Austere, underlit, uncompromisingly lackadaisical at three hours, and anachronistic in a half dozen ways.
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
While the film’s desperately sad finale indicates that Philippe Garrel knows the truth of '68 better than most and might have suffered a crisis in faith in the years since, this magnificent film is itself proof that all was not lost.
Regular Lovers isn't a folly-of-youth story that aches with emotion, like "Au Revoir," "Les Enfants" or "The Squid And The Whale." It's drier, and simpler.
Long, talky and shot in black and white. In other words, it requires a commitment in time and brain power - a commitment worth making.
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