LES AMANTS RÉGULIERS

May 1968, Paris. The movement of general worker strikes and student contests that had had aftershocks beyond the French frontiers that Spring happened in the same decade that Philippe Garrel began to film, before the age of twenty. The first titles, short and long, of the official filmography, years after the thirteen, fourteen of the adolescent who filmed Une plume pour Carol, are Les enfants désaccordés (1964) and Marie pour mémoire (1967). Among these are situated other works, Droit de visite or Anémone, but also, for example, the medium-length made-for-TV documentary Jeune cinéma: Godard et ses émules, which allowed the young Garrel an incursion into the shooting of Week-End by Jean-Luc Godard and to listen to the “young Godardian emulators” Francis Leroi, Luc Moullet, Jean-Michel Barjol, Romain Goupil, and Jean Eustache, filmed with close-ups on words and radiant smiles.

The idea of a generation, a post-Nouvelle Vague generation on the influence of Godard and Truffaut, is a recurrence of Garrel, who saw firsthand a master - Bande à part and La peau douce, Week-End and La mariée était en noire are contemporary to his cited first works, now that the Nouvelle Vague was diluting in its singularities of, besides those, Rivette, Chabrol, Varda, Rozier, Rohmer and the rest. Another is the youth of his generation in this embryonic moment, which Regular Lovers evokes in direct connection through fiction, like before, through documentary, doing so in Les Ministères de l’art (1988), dedicated to Jean Eustache and aligning Chantal Akerman, Benoit Jacquot, André Téchiné, Jacques Doillon or Werner Schroeter. There was, ardently, the connection to the production of the collective Zanzibar, of which the painter, sculptor, filmmaker Daniel Pommereulle (1937-2003) was also an element, to whom Regular Lovers is dedicated. There was Actua 1, six minutes of “revolutionary actualities” (1968), taken as lost until 2014, which Godard remembered as being exceptional, with the clarity of 35mm film to face, somberly, the riot police. That being said, May 1968, like the juvenile biography, is a seism with replicas in the work of Garrel.

Available, available is the youth. It is a sort of aphorism from the Portuguese artist Álvaro Lapa in the filmed conversation with Jorge Silva Melo, lover of Garrel’s work since the discovery of Marie pour mémoire with friends, on a trip to France in 1968, and who, in his life as filmmaker, began by the chronicle of a failed revolution from other times and desires in Passagem ou a Meio Caminho (1980). The reference, crossing lines, comes regarding the political-amorous failure which weaves Regular Lovers. And it underlines the “cinema of the son” which Jorge Silva Melo saw in Garrel writing, for the catalog of the Cinemateca (Philippe Garrel Uma alta solidão, 2003), the text in which it detains itself in the passage of “unforeseeable liberty”, of the “characters escaped to delirium”, of “life astray with which he surprised us so much in its initial delicacy” to the loss of the band, to coming face to face with memory, to the motive of representation starting from L’Enfant secret (1979). If his films continue to be “meteors, coming from the heart, passing us through life, like celestial accidents”, they were - for Jorge Silva Melo - pieces of an autobiography riddled with scars, “films of life represented, of memory incarnate, films of re-presentation, films shot loosely as one orders the dispersed notes and finalizes them, films already of the father and not of the eternal son [...].”

In the opening of the same catalog, Luís Miguel Oliveira notes how the cinema of Garrel “can be seen as a long, continuous and extremely personal chronicle of a trajectory along which a series of hopes begin to be lost”; the way the idea of May 68 “taken just like that, in the most idealistic of ways, continuing today to give a body to what this hope was”; the way I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar, The Phantom Heart, Wild innocence (1991-2001) “are films of a survivor, films of someone who crossed to the other side of the time of hope, and who lived to tell how it was (is)”. Regular Lovers was the following film. The title refers less to the collective movement than to that of the couple - and it’s true, as it was glimpsed that, taking in part the formal liberty of the Nouvelle Vague films, Regular Lovers circles as much around May 68 as the youth of the mid-2000s - sentimental movements and (a)temporal synchronies are other threads of Garrel’s cinema -, however much that in its nucleus resides the question of failure. Why?

Longstanding revolution? Immutable utopia? Revolutionaries of one night? Lovers in permanence? The exceptional couple of the title is made up of François and Lilie, two artists, a boy and a girl who near each other in the incendiary night of the barricades of 1968 and who, in the following year, live their love story among a group of youths fueled by opium in the ample bourgeois apartment of Antoine, afterwards in a modest pension room, until Lilie sights the anarchist mirage of Brooklyn and François starts to feel dropped in the abandonment of his city. She is played by Clotilde Hesme, who Garrel films twice looking at the camera, in one of them ambling, “The solitude that can be found in the heart of a man is unimaginable”. He is the son Louis Garrel, who Philippe has already filmed, reunited to grandfather Maurice Garrel and mother Brigitte Sy, a first time in Les baisers de secours (1989), but who here enters decisively into the cinema of his father - the three actors in a beautiful scene of the Regular Lovers, around a table and sardines, of Maurice’s beautiful monologue in close-up with a knife as a magic wand. Just in the last Le grand charriot (2023), actually contradicting the suggestion of the filmmaker for how he would have entered in his “imagination” phase at the time of the previous The Salt of Tears, Louis, Esther and Lena Garrel embody a family of dollmakers recalling the puppeteer biography of Maurice (1923-2011), who was no longer. And recalling the constellation of blood that circles in the films of Garrel through the father and the children, above all Louis, and which vibrates with the energy of the actors, so many times reflecting the same or interpolated people and doubles.

It must also be taken into account, in the Regular Lovers, the structure in chapters, the way the first of them is entitled Hopes of fire, preceding the steps of Gunshot hopes, The splendors of falling in love, The sleep of the just and how, beyond the four separating title cards, there is the inscription of two dates in two moments of the film, 68 and 69. It must be taken into account the profusion of details, sayings, citations. It must be taken into account the revolutionary energy, the torpor of opium, the shock of reality, the creative and amorous pulse. It must be taken into account the incandescent contrast of William Lubtschansky’s black-and-white, the naturalist lighting, the close-ups of faces, the fluidity of the camera and of the montage, the piano, the songs by Nico and the Kinks. It must be taken into account the shadow of loss. It must be taken into account the game of reflections. It must be taken into account that the first twenty minutes function in trompe l’oeil, with Garrel recreating in fiction, from memory, the precise rawness of the images filmed in 68 (Actua 1 which would return to the surface nine years past upon the staging-refilming combined in the recollection of these minutes of the film). And who hands to the son the character of the young poet who relives the autobiographical experience of a nocturnal escape by the roofs of Paris - supposedly the only scene accompanying Garrel’s direct participation step by step in the nocturnal manifestations of 68. It must be taken into account that the recreation of the events in the first twenty minutes, the hopes and the fires, are merely the first part of the film, which follows in the company of that intensity relating the collective sphere and the intimate sphere, the spaces and the times.

The time in these Regular Lovers is fluid and is jerky, elliptical, dreamed, like when François’ sleeping imagination rhymes the barricades of 68 in 2005 with that of the period film, an ancient revolutionary period. It is that of the “magic number” of Maurice Garrel’s character. It is that of the dance-sequence in the darkness of a discotheque in which movements of bodies are tears, traces of light - as in the dance-sequence of another song, another choreography in another cavern in The Salt of Tears - in the pop rhythm of a question that condenses the question stinging the film from one pole to the other augmenting the projections of each one, “This Time Tomorrow, where will we be?” Not staying around here.