Fin août, début septembre

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.

STYLIZED REALISM

A tremendous and moving depiction of friendship and love whose dialogue is obviously French and whose camera-verite is very Dogme 95. Through a hand-held whirl we see stunningly candid and enticingly bare portraits of the goings on and thoughts of a group of friends including all the nuances of relationships. In this regard, Assayas's film is very similar to "La Promesse" and the Dogme 95 films. But the dialogue is extremely French in that it is very dramatic and a little too perfect to be real: dialogues feature characters who engage in dialogue's where they listen and think rather than argue. Yet even this works in the films favor, making you all the more taken in by characters demonstrate such depth.

The performances are remarkable and for the most part, the characters brilliantly faceted.

The movie is a bit longer than it needs to be, but the subtlety of the scenes requires patient development.

If you like Robert Bresson, Hal Hartley, Lars Van Trier, or Thomas Vinterburg, go see this. The style of the camerawork and the lushness of some of the lighting makes this a must see for the screen

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.

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.

The style of the film, described elsewhere as in the 'Dogme 95' genre, really works well for this story, especially on the cinema screen; on video, the transfer was made from a slightly poor-quality print, which is too bad - the photography in the movie is excellent. For the technically-oriented, "Fin Aout, Début Septembre" was filmed in Super-16mm, and in my opinion this sort of plot is perfectly suited to the S16, or the DV-originated type of storytelling technique. It's true there was no murder or gratuitous violence, no rape or incest, no endless spurting of tears and confessions, which is frankly the reason I love this film. The dialogues are believable, the characters are very real, with that feeling of people we've known and maybe not always loved or cared to be around, but who are part of life nonetheless...I admire a filmmaker who is willing to present characters that are based in life, not in movie clichés, and Assayas pulls it off here wonderfully in my opinion.