Alexander Clayton Others have gotten into the film with further depth, but to add my two cents won't take long. It's more of a general review.This is a film that had promise (perhaps like the lives of the students), but then really didn't go anywhere (like many lives)...perhaps that was the point, but it didn't make for a compelling film throughout. I'm giving it a 7:+ 8 for intention/promise6 for overall executionWhat I liked: characters who were finding themselves/evolving, challenging the status quo, and were willing to fight for what they believed in drew me in. The art direction gave the film a consistent and believable look and feel.What I didn't like: lack of a strong narrative or focus throughout the film made it hard to stay engaged; some of the music was just odd at times; the characters' motivations were hazy and malleable; and it was a bit long for what the film ended up being (it could have been better if shorter and more neatly wrapped up or much longer and followed the characters years down the road; the length didn't help the film).If you like French films, you'll probably enjoy this to some degree as I did. If you like the constant, mindless action, tight editing, fast dialog and vapidness of most Hollywood films, don't bother.

tieman64 "The uncomfortable truth of the matter is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there will be no future for humanity, because the extermination of humanity is the ultimate concomitant of capital's destructive course of development." - Ivan Meszaros "The majority is always on the side of routine and immobility, so much is it unenlightened, encrusted and apathetic. Those who do not want to move forward are the enemies of those who do, and unhappily it is the mass which persists stubbornly in never budging at all." - Gracchus Babeuf Olivier Assayas dedicated a 2005 Cahiers Du Cinema article to the widow of Guy Debord, the famous French Marxist philosopher. In the article, Assayas discusses the post 1968 revolutionary vanguard and his involvement in it. Assayas' films have themselves become increasingly political, moving from trashy meditations on global capitalism ("Boarding Gate", "Demonlover", "Summer Hours") to bio-pics on political terrorists (2010's "Carlos").Inferior to all these films is Assayas' "Something in the Air". Evocative of Bresson's "The Devil Probably", Godard's "Le Chinoise", Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point", Bertolucci's "Dreamers"/"Before the Revolution" and Fassbinder's "The Third Generation", the film watches as a student named Gilles finds himself caught up in the political turmoils of 1960s-70s France.Like most of the aforementioned films, "Something in the Air" is about political disengagement. Whilst radicals, students and workers take to the streets, young Gilles heads off into other directions. But Gilles doesn't simply disengage from politics, but sees such disengagement as the ultimate manifestation of his own free-will, freedom of expression and personal identity. This "identity" is mostly aligned to sex, wistful longings for past lovers, paintings, a desire for celebrity and trashy B movies involving Nazis and dinosaurs. For Gilles, activist movements impose their wills, doctrines and mantras too forcefully upon him. They leave no room for deviation, which Gilles, an artist, finds constricting."Something in the Air's" Gilles character was based on the defining years of Assayas' own adolescence. Early scenes watch as he mingles with radical film-makers (resembling Godard's Dziga Vertov Group), whilst others see him drawn to both the romance of revolution and the revolution of modern romance. But he's unable to commit to either, interested only in dabbling in things in the spirit of youthful experiment. Assayas encapsulates Gilles' personality early by having him scratch an "anarchist" symbol whilst a teacher delivers a lecture on orthodox Marxist history. The point? Gilles is his own man. An individualist! Assayas doesn't condemn or praise this, but the film nevertheless makes it clear that the "thing in the air" has shifted from breathless excitement to nothing less than the death of radicalism, the next generation torn between solidarity and personal ambition, selflessness and self-obsession. As French philosopher Regis Debray would say: "the Great Day has been and gone." 7/10 – Like Bruno Dumont's "Hadewijch", Assayas' film owes too much to Bresson's "The Devil Probably". See too Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy". Worth one viewing.

k_laxo Great movie that does put you in the shoes of those 60 and 70's idealists and lets us contemplate the beauty of their existence, and I mean the kind of movie like Melancholia, which makes you feel things from such a different perspective. The movie does not deal directly with contemporary contradictions of idealism, but it is undeniable that this issue awakens in us when witnessing the characters strife for integrity. It somewhat scented like Spike Lee way of proposing a theme for me. It weaves some plots which are left in low key, just to draw our attention to what really matters for the narrator. We are dealing naive yet sophisticated people - which is the beautiful paradox of their being. I must say that I didn't like a pair of choices like that insertion of Laura when Gille is reading her letter in the subway. For me it breaks the harmony, it is kind of out of the blue solution - though it has its coherence, and, again reminds me of Spike Lee's Jungle Fever.

euroGary I don't have a lot to say about 'Something in the Air', mainly because it doesn't seem to have a coherent plot - perhaps appropriately, given that it's about a bunch of anarchists. A group of French teenagers in the 1970s sit around in smoke-filled rooms thinking too much, occasionally carrying out acts of violence in the anarchist 'cause'. As time passes some remain committed to the cause, while others, though still professing belief, find their personal lives and ambitions eclipsing their anarchy. If you're in the right mood for this type of film it certainly hits the spot, and there's a very amusing scene where one of the young men gets a job at Pinewood Studios in the UK and finds himself working on a film involving Nazis, sea-monsters and a scantily-clad cavegirl - a far cry from the experimental (read: commercially unviable) cinema to which he'd rather devote his time. Welcome to real life, mate!