Ende August, Anfang September

Slow-paced, nuanced portrait of the friends surrounding a dying man. Wonderfully subtle and insightful, with outstanding acting and a marvelous script. Director Assayas' skill behind the camera is evident in every shot, despite lack of variety in locations and little action. Lots of conversation but the best moments come when the camera begins to wander. The kind of film you need to throw yourself into to truly appreciate. Very, very french.

i like french films, especially french films where everybody thinks they are the bomb, nobody works and everybody lounges around drinking coffee. that's my ideal in life, but enough about me. the story is about a bunch of middle aged people who each is going through some sort of crisis. basically they meet each other and discuss their life, not in a direct way, but through inneundo. are they full of themselves, yes, but it's still fun to watch. not the best of film making, but while we rot on this planet and babes like the one you see on this movie are out of our grasp, we can watch this movie. man this review is lame! fudge IMDb! fudge comments!

25 years have passed since the release of 'Fin août, début septembre'. Watching it a generation later was a very interesting experience for me. In 1998, Olivier Assayas had just enjoyed success with 'Irma Vep', until today considered one of his best films. He was then and is still today one of the best directors in France, in Europe and in the whole world. Mathieu Amalric is one of my favorite actors and he has never let me down. Two very good reasons, then, to see the film, and I didn't regret it at all. In a way it could be a time capsule that takes us back 25 years. However, the years have not left a very visible mark, if we ignore the absence of the mobile phones. From a cinematographic point of view, 'Fin août, début septembre' could still pass as an experimental film today, and I'm sure that film directors from one place or another are doing or planning similar experiments right now. Wheels are constantly being reinvented.

The main characters are mature people who, however, lived up to that moment in a kind of extension of their adolescences. Gabriel is a writer and editor in his 30s. He has just broken up with his ex-girlfriend and has started a relationship with Anne, a slightly younger and somewhat sassy girl. His friend, Adrien, is a writer of great talent, but whom the publishers are kind of boycotting. He is sick but tries to brave the illness and gets involved in a relationship with a very young girl. Much of the film is made up of dialogues between these friends and their girlfriends, and their respective boyfriends and girlfriends. Lots of dialogue, as in any film about French intellectual circles. The dramatic events will show up eventually, but what matters and what reveals the essence of the characters are precisely the dialogues.

Shot nervously with a very mobile 16mm camera, with spontaneous, perhaps improvised dialogues, the film leaves a strong sense of authenticity. Acting is outstanding. Mathieu Amalric is in top form and dominates the screen in a complex role, one of his best. His ailing friend, Adrien, is played with restraint and dignity by François Cluzet. The role of Anne is very well played by Virginie Ledoyen, an extremely talented actress. I don't know exactly why, her career has not lived up to the promises, but it's certainly not because of this role. Olivier Assayas makes a risky bet by putting the story (which still has plenty of interesting elements) on the back burner and devoting most of the screen time to life itself. He won, I think, the bet. I confess that I didn't initially connect with what was happening on the screen either, and was intimidated by the avalanche of chatter. But my patience was rewarded, the characters became familiar and I started to care about them. Towards the end, the drama and emotion also appeared. 'Fin août, début septembre' is a snapshot in the lives of the characters and a moment of quality in late 20th century French cinema.

This is a pretty stereotypical French film in that involves a lot a not-terribly-interesting, very bourgeois French people talking endlessly about their personal relationships and the meaning of life (I wasn't expecting Hollywood-style gun fights and car crashes, but there has to be a happy medium somewhere). The bland lead is dealing with his failed relationship with his long-time ex-girlfriend and his inability to commit to his present lover (Virginie Ledoyen)as he also comes face-to-face with his unrealized literary ambitions and the imminent death of his older and slightly more successful mentor. The dying mentor, meanwhile, is a published but still obscure author. Although he is middle-aged, he has taken on an unusually precocious fifteen-year-old as a mistress--why? because this a French movie, the country that gave us Eric "Claire's Knee" Rohmer and was the first to publish Vladimir Nabokov's scandalous novel "Lolita"--making borderline pedophilia look vaguely classy seems to be a longstanding French cinematic tradition.

The best reason to watch this movie is for Virginie Ledoyen who is most familiar to American audiences as Leonardo DeCaprio's girlfriend in "The Beach" and for her appearance on the cover of a number of lowbrow men's magazines like "Maxim". She is actually a pretty good actress though and the movie shows some signs of life whenever she is on screen (which is all too infrequently I'm afraid). The only other remarkable things about this movie is the relative dearth of sex scenes (although there is one memorable very one with Ledoyen near the end)and the fact that many of these characters actually seem to have jobs(!)and are not just lounging on the beach or in the countryside as is usually the case in French movies. Other than that this film is very stereotypical. If you like talky French movies in general, you'll probably like it, but if not, I wouldn't bother.

Can actors save an otherwise completely bad movie? The answer is of course "yes". Proof, if needed, is the possibly horrible "Fin août début septembre". The only reasons I went to see it, were the fact that the movie was directed by Assayas (who impressed me with "Irma Vep") and that it starred Virginie Ledoyen (up till now excellent in every movie she ever played in). Yes, she was very nice in "L'eau froide", a not so good movie by... Olivier Assayas. Oops! Yet, with Miss Ledoyen and "Irma Vep" in mind, I went to the theatre... and was quite disappointed. The story is so lame I can't even convince myself of giving you a summary. Then we have the director... Well, I can only think of two things that must have happened. Either Olivier Assayas was constantly absent and gave the camera to his five year old nephew, or he tried to make something resembling a Dogma 95 movie. We'll go for reason number one. The camera spins and spins when there is no reason to spin. When your actors sit on the ground, you don't have to make wild images. Unless of course the cameraman is so busy trying not to fall from the stairs at that moment. Maybe falling wouldn't have been that bad: we wouldn't have had the rest of the movie.

But this is going to startle you: I gave the movie a 6/10. Excuse me? A six? Well yes, a six... because the actors (mainly Virginie... again / of course) are so good that you try not to see what Assayas did to the movie. If you are somebody who can look at actors and enjoy their work, maybe you can have a look at this movie. If not, pretend it's poisoned with plutonium.

(P.S. I wonder if I would have given the movie 6/10 if Virginie Ledoyen hadn't been in it. I guess only a remake can tell me that. But in case Assayas accidently reads this: DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!)