It is often rightly considered Philippe Garrel like an old-fashioned director, a survivor of a French guerrilla cinemathe new wave, which marked a break with the immediate past and whose echoes extend to the present.
Not surprisingly, Garrel began his career in 1967 with ‘Marie pour mémoire’, after two short films and a documentary, ‘Le Jeune Cinéma: Godard et ses émules’ (1967), with statements by the director of ‘At the end of a getaway ‘ (1960), as well as Jean Eustache, Luc Moullet and Francois Leroi. Garrel does not initially have the immediate status of a classic that marked the main directors of the movement, but his work has been revalued outside of France in due measure over time.
Garrel, a total author who keeps the “nouvelle vague” alive
His cinema welcomes both the activist and militant position of Godard and the warm intimacy of Truffaut, and develops, between the 20th and 21st centuries, tropes, obsessions and particular styles. Garrel therefore creates a personal and sober style, connected with romanticism, noir and decadencewhose imprint can be seen in established filmmakers such as Robert Guédigian, the still emerging work as a director of his own son, Louis Garrel and, lastly, the films of young and very personal directors such as Anäis Volpé or Suzanne Lindon.
If we do the math, we will see that, to spend more than half a century directing cinema, Garrel directed his first short film, ‘Les enfants désaccordés’ when he was only fifteen years old. His constant, unstoppable love for his profession – his last film, ‘The Salt of Tears’ dates from 2020 – makes us think of Godard himself, with a vast body of work, or of Eric Róhmer or Claude Chabrol, who continued to be active until recently. time before his death. He is also an absolute author: in his films He works as a producer, screenwriter and editor and on many occasions also as a director of photography.
Although his exciting filmography offers many gems to be discovered by the most demanding and exquisite gourmet, ‘the usual lovers‘ (2005), for which he won FIPRESCI from critics at the prestigious European Film Awards, is perhaps the most important film of his last stage. To affirm this, I base myself, apart from the quality of the work, on two fundamental vertices: the leading role of his son, louis garreland the content, a review of the facts of may 68 and its impact on French youth, something that immediately connects the film with the most activist cinema of Jean-Luc Godard but also with other references that we will review below.
‘The Usual Lovers’ (or regular, or everyday, according to the various translations) is situated in the director’s filmography just after his other great films from this last stage, the bleak noir ‘Wild Innocence’ (2001), where addresses the issue of heroin and drug trafficking. It is no coincidence that his atrocious portrait of the times of May 1968 is impregnated with the gloomy and desperate tone of that.
With their nearly three hours longthis is a tough movie, but not for that reason inaccessible, especially for the viewer accustomed to the films of Garrel’s main references. Unlike his admired Godard, the director tackles the portrait of a cursed artist, a poet played by his son, a future filmmaker, with a moving closeness and empathy, using a frontal approach to the protagonist and his circumstances wherever the director of ‘ Made in USA’ (1966) would almost certainly have used distancing, irony, play and metaphor.
A painful x-ray of the revolutionary artist
Garrel’s film, apart from the portrait of an era, is the x-ray of the quintessence of the cursed artist in a youth perpetuated. The first hour of footage deals with introducing, in a meticulous way, both complicit and cold, the central character, François. Extraordinary are the long scenes that reconstruct the Parisian revolts against the forces of order, and in which the character of the sculptress Lilie appears for the first time (impressive Clotilde Hesmewith which Garrel’s camera falls in love from the first moment), which will be of paramount importance in the second half of the story.
The black and white photography of William Lubchanskyas well as the music of Jean-Claude Vannier. Both participate in creating an oppressive and immersive atmosphere that will set the basic tone of the adventure.
Next, we attend the trial of François, in which he is accused of sneaking out of military service for ideological reasons. The defense insists on his status as a poet and his extreme sensitivity. Garrel shows the trial with documentarian’s eyeimposing an involved perspective but at the same time committed to presenting the facts in a reliable way, without underlining or excessive complicity.
All this long first half will have special importance in the subsequent evolution of the story, and in the beginning of the love story with Lilie, for which Garrel considers it essential to spend time involving us both in the historical context and in the particularity of his character. central, whom we also see in long scenes smoking opium with his fellow revolutionaries. It is in this way that we will see ourselves more immersed in a doomed love affair and in the tragic end of the character of François, wholly consistent with his poetic status as a pariah, rebellious and cursed.
the other dreamers
The sentimental relationship between François and Lilie will occupy the second and most important block of the film, divided into several episodes. doLove makes sense in an environment of continuous subversion and constant activism, in which the everyday becomes another battlefield? Garrel is pessimistic, laconic and blunt: the love relationship, instead of serving as a lifeline, only pushes the artist further towards the abyss.
And artists are, in this case, both Lilie and François: he a poet, she a sculptor, driven towards a love story marked by the signs of pain and failure. The multifaceted director, an unlucky demiurge, flees here from the initial coldness and distance to immerse himself in the elusive psyches of his protagonists: the film turns on itself, talking about sex, ego, pain, failure, drugs (François is addicted to opium, as we have seen since the beginning of the film), of politics, of tenderness, of the revolution and, inevitably and as a consequence of all the above, of confusion and disenchantment.
The film then keeps a look intimate that relates her to the director of ‘The Four Hundred Blows’ (1959). She becomes more emotional, closer, but also more metacinematic. Garrel exposes his references not as a novel that needs to explain what his sources are and show that he knows what he is doing, but in the form of small winks and tributes, implying that his characters also inhabit a reality in which cinema is a form of of escape and a source of life and inspiration.
In this way, the cinema of Pasolini and also ‘Before the revolution’ (1964) by Bertolucci. It should be remembered that, despite the fact that the timeless aesthetic may seem more typical of other years, ‘The Usual Lovers’ was shot just two years after the Italian director signed one of his latest masterpieces, ‘Dreamers’, also starring by Louis Garrel, a view of the same time period from an almost opposite perspective.
‘The Usual Lovers’, now considered a modern classic and one of the peaks of the work of its director, won in its day, in addition to the aforementioned FIPRESCI award, the Silver Lion in Venice for best director and an award for technical contribution for its superb formal finish, in addition to the César for best revelation actor (Garrel). He can now be rescued via Filmin by searching for his original title, ‘The regular lovers‘.