Entertainment

Undercooked ‘Something in the Air’ has nothing to say about high school revolution

Olivier Assayas’ “Something in the Air,” like his similarly undercooked 2010 film “Summer Hours,” has the aroma of an autobiographical confession by someone for whom life hasn’t been overly difficult.

It’s 1971, and high school revolution is in the air. Gilles (Clément Métayer), the obvious Assayas stand-in, is a budding teen artist and anarchist who, along with his classmates and girlfriends (Carole Combes, Lola Créton), spends lots of time shouting at the police, scrawling graffiti, viewing revolutionary films, occasionally heaving cement at (and injuring) a guard and smoking important cigarettes. There’s lots of talk about the Workers, with whom none of the well-heeled kids seems to have the slightest contact. Like most groaningly self-serious pictures this one could have been turned into satire with only a slight tweak.

Though Gilles is reading a book that reveals the truth about the Cultural Revolution in China, the movie doesn’t actually delve into political arguments, instead employing a hazy, drifting, idea-free and nearly plotless style — it’s a bildungsroman with an unusually aloof central character. Gilles is so spoiled that he chafes against an offer by his father, a well-off film producer, to teach him the trade, calling the old man a sellout.

As the kids paint each other naked, do drugs, dash off to Italy and dance around the campfire, the film has nothing new to say about these bourgeois Marxists and, as storytelling, it’s torpid and wan. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 2003 film “The Dreamers,” set three years earlier, covered much the same ground — love, cinema, revolution — with about 50 times as much color and passion.