A bunch of attractive young people study film, quote poetry and have sex, in a black and white drama fatally lacking narrative drive and passion
Here is a film that presumes greatly on the audience’s cinephile indulgence: a two-hour-plus monochrome drama about attractive young students arriving in
Paris to study film, discuss politics, quote poetry, argue about movies and gain urgent access to each others’ pants. It’s the sort of thing that I usually roll over for. But there isn’t much in the way of lightness or plausibility. The all-too-guessable sad ending is worryingly glib and the final extended shot, over the adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth, comes close to unendurable.
Like a film by Philippe Garrel, this behaves at all times as if it is 1968, rather than the present day – which, as I say, need not have been a problem at all, if there was some authentic passion or narrative interest.