Between 1904 and 1906, James Joyce tried to write an autobiographical novel called “Stephen Hero,” but he grew frustrated with the manuscript and abandoned it (it was published posthumously in 1944). A decade later, armed with the publication of his short-story collection Dubliners, he revisited this failed pass at a first novel, emphasizing the psychology of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, and experimenting with language and form to create A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. For Joyce, practice and perspective enabled him to craft a more meaningful expression of his life experience.
Radical politics also figure prominently in Something in the Air, whose French release title, Apres Mai (“After May”) references the May 1968 uprisings in France. The film opens “near Paris” in late spring 1971, with Gilles carving an anarchy symbol into his desk at school. After class he hands out liberal political papers on the school grounds, where he’s alerted to a protest. Shouting slogans and wearing helmets, he and his fellow activists march up to a throng of riot police who wield batons and fire off gas grenades. The ensuing melee prompts Gilles and his friends to vandalize their school, once with spray paint and again with Molotov cocktails. Chased by security, they throw a sandbag over a walkway on top of one of the guards, which leaves him in a coma.
Toward the end of the story, while working on a film set, Gilles walks behind a movie screen, a symbolic representation of Assayas walking into his future as a filmmaker. It’s not quite Stephen Dedalus setting out to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” but it seems an apt summation of the director’s intent. Something in the Air is the cinematic equivalent of a Joycean epiphany, for the characters and possibly for the audience. You might not walk out of it wanting to move to Europe or become an artist, but you might be inspired to ponder what makes you happiest and whether or not it’s still possible to make that passion the motor of your life.
Directed by Olivier Assayas
