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Paris, a night in May ‘68. François Dervieux (played by Louis Garrel, the filmmaker’s son), 20,
is a poet. He marches with the demonstrators, joins the barricades, looks the riot police straight
in the eye. On the roof of a building where he’s taken refuge, he has visions of 1789 and 1848.
‘68 has shown him, ‘You’re always alone, no matter what’. Alone, and wondering if you should
choose romanticism over anarchy, anarchy over death, and death over realism.
Philippe Garrel was himself 20 in ‘68. He was already making poetic films, and had shot two
shorts (LES ENFANTS DÉSACCORDÉS, and DROIT DE VISITE), two feature films ('Anémone', and
'Marie pour Mémoire') and a number of programmes for television, on rock music, girls, and the
work of Jean-Luc Godard. The news reports with a revolutionary slant that he filmed with col-
leagues during the May ‘events’ were lost in the processing lab and will never be seen again.
Jean-Luc Godard recalls some shots from them, ‘the only ones in which you saw the riot police
full face, in dark, austere 35mm, at a time when everyone was using soft-focus 16mm. And Gar-
rel himself says he filmed 'allegories, figures posing in front of the barricades like statues...
I was trying to show that Paris was cut in two'. And REGULAR LOVERS (Les Amants Réguliers)
is itself a film cut in two, and divided into a number of ‘poems’: ‘expectations of action’,
‘shattered hopes’, ‘flashes of unbitterness’ and ‘the sleep of the just’. First, there’s a ‘barricade
film’ (showing scenes of the May events, filmed as if they were the preliminaries for a party,
fearful and seen through a fog of teargas), followed by a ‘barricaded film’, tracing the withdraw-
al from Paris of a group of people who refused to give up, who had had enough of this way of
living, choosing to live a free, self-sufficient life in a house in the woods, far from civilisation, full
of boys, girls and opium. There, François meets Lilie (played by Clotilde Hesme), a girl (unless,
that is, she’s an angel). They fall in love (‘look, our hands are the same’). She leaves, he’s devas-
tated, in a last discordant dream; heroic doses of drugs offer him refuge in a sleep that soothes
his pain. ‘In this sky, in oblivion’. That provides the lines of his final poem.
REGULAR LOVERS (Les Amants Réguliers) can be seen as Garrel’s response to Bertolucci’s
DREAMERS, a film about ‘68 in which Louis Garrel was also the central figure. In ‘68, Bertolucci
was in Rome, shooting 'Partner', with Tina Aumont and Pierre Clementi (two actors Garrel likes).
It’s a film that Bertolucci doesn’t much like now, but which Garrel admires. In the summer of ‘68,
to get away from Paris and its shattered dreams, Garrel went to the Black Forest to shoot 'Le
Révélateur', and 'La Concentration', with Jean-Pierre Léaud and Zouzou, a prophetic, schizo-
phrenic film he says he doesn’t much like now but which Bertolucci, this time, admires.
And it was in ‘69, in a house in Italy where the Zanzibar group and Frédéric Pardo, Tina Aumont
and Daniel Pommereulle, to whom REGULAR LOVERS (Les Amants Réguliers) is dedicated,
were all staying at the time, that Garrel met the singer, muse and model, Nico, with whom he
was to make seven dreamlike films. Who said that was another story?
People have said that with REGULAR LOVERS (Les Amants Réguliers), his twenty-seventh
film (as with his earlier L’ENFANT SECRET) Philippe Garrel follows the principle of identification
as much as that of composition. Those who are relatively familiar with the turning points of his
private life will think they recognise certain episodes from it; others will see an invented story,
with its heroes and its tainted sweetness. The truth hovers somewhere in between the two,
any attempt to copy nature being doomed to failure, as Faust teaches us. In this case also, me-
mory has been rewritten around a fiction. These emotions have had an existence, and that adds
to the film’s clarity. It contains a number of hints that it is based on reality: a film-maker casts
members of his family (his son, Louis, and his father, Maurice) and the women in his life: Brigitte
Sy, Caroline Deruas-Garrel, Aurelia Alcaïs, and Nico. We hear her song, ‘Vegas’, but since it was written in 1981, this is a delightful, teasing piece of anachronism. Today is already tomorrow…
No single approach can exhaust the depths of this film, perhaps Garrel’s most accessible since
L’ENFANT SECRET (1979) and J’ENTENDS PLUS LA GUITARE (1990) (about Nico, the Swedish
model, singer and actress who was director Garrel's muse). It has a certain weightlessness,
carried along on the breath of a youth rediscovered through inheritance (a gift from father to
son) or, more accurately, by transubstantiation (a gift from son to father). Above all, for the first
time in years for Garrel (perhaps since LE BERCEAU DE CRISTAL, with its suggestion of Andy
Warhol and the Factory) it is a group film, a film made by intimates, populated by students from
the Conservatoire, who provide its flesh and bones and enable Garrel to achieve the longest
possible ‘wavelength’: a large form.
REGULAR LOVERS (Les Amants Réguliers) runs for three hours, which is unusual for Garrel
and allows him to increase the scale of his design: the couple, despite being crucial to his films,
constantly disappears, to be replaced by the group. In 1969, this is a circle of friends, lovers,
holders-out, drugged-up dandies, artists prolonging the excitement of ‘68 in a life of luxurious
anonymity, vague figures from the nights of May ’68, all learning, despite oppression, failure,
fatigue and confusion, to become individuals again, searching for a ‘spirit of ‘69’. These ‘steady
lovers’ are superstitious; when they enter a building they nervously check its number: 68, like a
password. In 1969, those who have left Paris speak exclusively in secret codes, or orders
(‘Let’s get high’), whether they’re militants, drug-users, lonely lovers, or all three. Together, they
make up the community of sleepwalkers.
Philippe Azoury
(Author of an essay on Philippe Garrel, due to be published early in 2006 by l’Etoile/ Cahiers du Cinema).
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