Review of Something in the Air

2020 and I re-visited this film that I saw way back in 2013. I was indifferent to it then and I am sort of angry with it now. I am not going to pontificate on the success or failure of May 1968, except to say that the young are old now and I wonder how they see the world at present that they helped create. From a half-baked idea of revolution with all its argumentative factions followed by the dreadfully passive hippie culture a lot of these young hetero people soaked up materialism. A lot of the Paris crowd were privileged and they advanced their privilege and perhaps - who knows ? - turned a Paris for ordinary people into a rich Disneyland. This opinion is not irrelevant to what happens on the screen and as far as I could see Assayas should have been fiercer about this period. All he has done is put pretty and strictly heterosexual young people on screen who look as if they have come out of a fashion magazine. They talk of the underprivileged and then talk about student's rights, and some want art and others class war. 50 years on we have a spoiled race and demands on our world's resources. The old may have been a world of male supremacy then, and still is and increasingly so despite the more worthy newspapers urging for change. We live in a world created by these people in the film, and the semi-romantic and lushly beautiful images deny the existence of those who were marginalised in the 1968 struggle. The good people who were elderly then and wanted change, homosexuals who were despised and the workers themselves who eventually felt excluded by the hetero elite who were ' revolting '. I also agree with another reviewer who felt the film fell apart after a brilliant opening of sickening authoritarian violence. To sum up: a self-indulgent film. I fell apart laughing on the merits of Simenon. An annoying film.