Olivier Assayas’ ‘Something In The Air’

When it came out in France last year, this film was titled Après Mai, May being that of 1968 when France descended into near-anarchy. It was a cathartic moment, subsequently referred to in France as les événements. Various directors have made films set during the period, (eg Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, (Innocents, 2003), but the subject inevitably has limited appeal outside France. Nonetheless there are probably quite a few people who were around at the time and agree with the late Christopher Hitchens:

As someone born in 1949, I prefer to consider myself not a mere sixties person but a soixante-huitard.

Assayas was born in 1955 and was probably kept indoors during the real thing. But since the tensions of 1968 continued for some years afterwards, his film, being to some extent autobiographical, concerns a group of lycée (ie high school/sixth form) students in the summer of 1971, three Mays later. It seems to be a convention in French cinema that the only subject seen to be taught in a lycée is French literature (cf Ozon’s In the House, earlier this year). To advance the cause of the proletariat these 17-year old children of the bourgeoisie engage in Maoist (or maybe Trotskyite, the sort of issue they would debate at length) acts of political violence, coming up against reality in the form of the CRS. For relief they dabble with the drugs of the period. You can take your pick as to whether the UK/US title, Something in the Air, is actually referring to tear gas or pot smoke, the revolution not so much being here as over. When it all gets too much they take themselves off to Italy for R&R and a bit of underground film-making.   Once back in Paris the Assayas-like character, Gilles, decides to abandon his talent for Eminesque drawing to follow in his father’s footsteps in the film business, just like Assayas did. So as the film ends he is starting work at Pinewood (chosen to boost the UK market perhaps, and looking like it did in My Week with Marilyn) on the set of a rubbishy Nazis and dinosaurs flick – well what would you expect from les Anglo-saxons? And where does Gilles finds solace but in a season of French experimental shorts at the Electric Cinema in Notting Hill.

To give credit where it’s due, the 1970s seem to be authentically set and the riot scenes are convincing enough. In that pre-digital age agitprop was a print-based activity, so the girls got to operate the machines when they weren’t keeping house for the collective or partying in long white dresses, as though auditioning for Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.  As may be apparent by now, I was a little disappointed in this film, particularly because I liked Assayas' Summer Hours (L'heure d'été, 2008). I suspect Après Mai might have benefited from editing down from its 122 minutes to 100 or so. Assayas is married to the talented young director Mia Hansen-Løve, whose film The Father of My Children (Le père de mes enfants, 2009), I mentioned at the end of a post here two years ago.

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens died on 15 December at the age of 62. So much has been written in the last few days by people who knew him, (for example Ian McEwan, [but not yet it seems] Martin Amis, and Simon Schama and, of course, his brother, Peter,) that there is not much left for the rest of us to say. When I was reading his memoir, Hitch-22, I found, rather to my surprise, that we seemed to have a few things in common. One was obvious, also we were both born in the late 1940s and had 1950s boyhoods, and went to not dissimilar sorts of school. But not much after that, as is to be expected in the land of CP Snow’s 'two cultures'*. And the small point that he was exceptionally talented.

Most of us in now our sixties didn’t go on the ‘political journey’ which David Aaronovitch in the Times (£) describes Hitchens as having made – obviously from the ‘Left’, the word appearing 10 times in the article, but where to? Surely not to the ‘Right’, which isn’t mentioned. It seems more like a journey from Trotskyism to Neo-conservatism, but how many neocons are atheists?

Hitchens was a very elegant writer, but I stumbled on one sentence in Hitch-22 when he was describing an interview not long after Oxford for a traineeship at the BBC:

I wasn’t stupid enough not to realise that he wouldn’t have asked that question if he didn’t already know the answer to it.

which I reckon to be a quadruple negative, and not to be attempted by novices!

Hitchens’ death seems to have induced a ‘Diana moment’ among the literary intelligentsia in London and on the East Coast (judging from here). But probably not a global one like Steve Jobs’ passing at the age of 56 in October. In Paris Le Figaro covered Hitchens’ death briefly, describing him as a “polémiste réputé dans le monde anglo-saxon”. The political intelligentsia in London had had their Diana moment in November when New Labour’s polling expert Philip Gould died at the age of 61.

Our expectations of life expectancy are now such that any death under 70 seems to induce a sense of loss. Not least because of the things that these three men in particular might have done if they had worked for another 10 years or more. Gould could well have influenced the outcome of the next general election in the UK. Both Hitchens and Gould died as a consequence of the relatively rare cancer of the oesophagus, associated with tobacco smoking and heavy alcohol use.

* For a recent view of this, see ‘CP Snow’s Two Cultures Revisited’, the 2009 CP Snow Lecture given by Professor Lisa Jardine (Jacob Bronowski’s daughter) downloadable here.

ADDENDUM 22 DECEMBER

A thoughtful piece about Hitchens by David Goodhart has now appeared on the Prospect Magazine website.
(Personal hobbyhorse: the US, not the UK, had babyboomers.) 

ADDENDUM 24 APRIL 2012

On 20 April 2012 a memorial service for Christopher Hitchens was held in New York. Martin Amis delivered the eulogy which Vanity Fair (to which Hitchens was a contributing editor) has made available.

ADDENDUM 31 AUGUST 2012

Martin Amis in an interview with Joseph Weisburg of Slate on 29 August offered “reflections on the life and passing of his dear friend, Christopher Hitchens.”