Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Idealism gives way to compromise for a group of frustrated friends in Olivier Assayas' modest yet moving new film.
Jul 7, 1999 | Olivier Assayas' last film, "Irma Vep," was one of the decade's great movies. A playful meditation on the divisiveness that has crept into filmmaking even as movies themselves cross borders of geography and genre and time, "Irma Vep" was an expression of faith that there are great movies still to be made, that the false barriers that separate "art" from "entertainment" can be traversed by filmmakers with passion and energy.
The experience of making "Irma Vep" would appear to have put Assayas in direct contact with his emotions in a way that wasn't always apparent in the rigorous, nearly clinical dramas that preceded it. And though melodramatic and sometimes shocking things happened in those pictures, Assayas' even-handedness seemed to resist assigning the events dramatic weight.
Assayas' new film, the ensemble drama "Late August, Early September," is not in the same league as "Irma Vep," but still, I think, it is a breakthrough for him. It's not that the subject matter -- a year in the life of a group of friends in their mid- to late-30s who are taking the last steps out of their extended adolescence -- is so far removed from that of his "Paris at Dawn" or "A New Life," or the superb coming-of-age drama "Cold Water" (one of the best foreign films yet to be released in this country). It's that "Late August, Early September" is warm and direct in a way that's new to Assayas' work. He is reaching for that rare place where judgment isn't precluded, but informed by understanding. We don't feel close to all the characters -- like the self-involved Gabriel (Mathieu Amalric) who lacks the guts to define his romantic relationships and whose admiration for his friend, the ailing novelist Adrien (Frangois Cluzet), is marbled with feelings of both inferiority and jealousy -- but I don't think there's a moment when Assayas doesn't put us inside his characters' heads.
Essentially, Assayas is trying to reinvent himself as a humanist filmmaker while staying true to the spirit of his generation and class of Parisians. The characters in "Late August, Early September" have reached the age where their youthful idealism is no longer enough to keep them from acknowledging the privations and limitations their choices have entailed. (As Liz Phair put it on her "whitechocolatespaceegg" album, "It's nice to be liked/but it's better by far to get paid.") Adrien mocks Gabriel's promise that Adrien's books, which don't sell, will be judged well by history. To Adrien, for whom money is a constant worry (as it is for all the characters), the judgment that will come after his death is cold comfort. In "Late August, Early September," the characters are constantly tempted by both bitterness and guilt. Assayas understands those temptations, but he doesn't give in to them. The cautious hopefulness of the film lies in the characters' realization that there is a life to be lived -- a good life -- beyond the compromises we are all forced to make.
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