Writer/director Philippe Garrel’s autobiographically-inspired epic Regular Lovers is a wonderfully melancholic meditation on both the events of May 1968 in revolutionary Paris and on a lost love in the numbed aftermath. The filmmaker’s son Louis (the star of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers) is the 20-year-old poet and student protester François, who’s dodging the draft, hurling Molotov cocktails from the barricades, and falling for the beautiful sculptor Lilie (Clotilde Hesme).
A virtually plotless homage to Nouvelle Vague cinema – beautiful young actors on the streets of the French capital, characters addressing the camera, fragments of conversation, dream sequences, the use of chapter headings – Regular Lovers isn’t an easy watch, but its hypnotic mood of sadness and disillusionment has a lingering power.
