Regular Lovers

While the film’s desperately sad finale indicates that Philippe Garrel knows the truth of '68 better than most and might have suffered a crisis in faith in the years since, this magnificent film is itself proof that all was not lost.

A magical and supernally beautiful meditative drug-trip head-space picture (a full-fledged ZZM, q.v. above) for which all Euro-film masochists should rearrange their schedules. It'll be out on DVD soon, and that's great. But Garrel's films are almost never seen on the big screen, and this one's worth it.

Through a haze of opium smoke and Molotov cocktails igniting, Regular Lovers plays out like the heavier politicized and unsentimentalized counterpoint to Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Dreamers."

Regular Lovers isn't a folly-of-youth story that aches with emotion, like "Au Revoir," "Les Enfants" or "The Squid And The Whale." It's drier, and simpler.

Long, talky and shot in black and white. In other words, it requires a commitment in time and brain power - a commitment worth making.

Austere, underlit, uncompromisingly lackadaisical at three hours, and anachronistic in a half dozen ways.

Regular Lovers evokes the '60s pretty well just through dialogue and rhythm -- better, in fact, than Bernardo Bertolucci's more reverently detailed "The Dreamers." However, the film's slow tempo induces the feeling one is living through the whole of 1968 in one sitting.