Something in the Air/Après Mai

The weakest film of prolific director Olivier Assayas’s entire career re-envisages the already over-mythologised aftermath of May 1968, as a pretty, vacant commercial. A pretty, vacant perfume commercial that lasts for two hours. Death, where is thy sting?

Somewhere, buried in a whole lot of beautiful garbage, there’s a bog- standard coming-of-age story struggling to get out. Gilles (Clément Métayer) wants to write or possibly paint when he leaves school. He wants to sleep with free-spirit Laure (Carole Combes) or insufferable drip Christine (the perennially miserable Lola Créton).

At least we think he does; the characters and plot of Something in the Air are so poorly realised they seem to exist in the same hinterland as dropped TV pilots. Look here, it's dancing redhead; look there, it's my best friend, the painter.

Early on, a “radical” student protest – that is, a whole lot of speechifying– lands one of the group in hot water. The friends duly leave their eye-wateringly well-appointed bourgeois dwellings and make for eye-wateringly clichéd destinations: some head for postcard-perfect Italy, others make for hippie-friendly Goa.

Is the director trying to convey a sense of disillusionment after the “rebellion”? Is he taking mean-spirited swipes at his young characters for their various blistering hypocrisies? Is he belatedly scolding about bickering within “the Left”? Who can say?

Something in the Air wanders between luscious vales with no particular place to go and absolutely nothing to say. The characters are too insubstantial to be described as bland and too pathetic to leave any impression beyond "But his hair looks nice". Artefacts from the era (a copy of Syd Barrett's The Madcap Laughs, a tome by Pierre Ryckmans) are, similarly, left artfully strewn around the place.

This is the “revolution” and false dawn these people deserve. But that’s scant consolation for the viewer, for whom it’s less like a proper film and more like one of the other Kardashians. That is to say: what’s the point.

Something in the air? Damned straight. And it stinks.