Waltzing, reflecting Paul Gauguin once said, “Art is either plagiarism or revolution,” without suggesting that he was able to formulate the basic idea from which the new cinema of post-war France, the so-called Nouvelle vague, which proclaimed in essence the triumph of revolutionary plagiarism, post-art in an era of brewing socio-political unrest, nihilistic philosophical discourses and sexual freedoms that replaced the proto-art and rudimentary views of the old bourgeoisie. The synematics of the whole New Wave, dispersed in the triennialism of the three res: revisionism, revanchism and revolution, in most cases is a postmodern intertextual mosaic, a patchwork of epochs, contexts, plots and author's biographies, since the New Wave became an example of obvious creative self-admiration, spherical narcissism, transferred to the cinematic syllable. But if Alain René and Alain Rob-Grier sublimated their own phantom pains on film, denying reality, and Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut quickly parted with the frustrations of personal experience, then Philip Garrel never renounced his past and himself, having developed his visions of cinematic art, with a recognizable experimental handwriting and almost complete absence of a coherent narrative.
Moreover, Garrel’s work one way or another appeals to the cyclical path of the whole French cinema, which from the 30s to the 50s and from the 70s to the 80s suffered from the academicity of cinematic decisions, and in the 60s and 90s up to the present time is experiencing another stage of its own renewal. Garrel always filmed as if the New Wave did not experience decline and did not fall into epileptic seizures of grotesque and secondary.
And most noticeable is the static film language of Garrel, close in spirit to the documentary spying on his characters, manifested in the film “Permanent Lovers” in 2004, the program work of the director in zero, who returned to the aesthetics and philosophy of Red May 1968, an event that changed the post-puberty world then not yet leftist-anarchist Philippe, who wrote himself in the tape under the name of Francois. However, the director is not at all inclined to indulge in the escapism, the superficial romanticism of young revolutionaries, since “Permanent Lovers”, Fabulously identical to “Mommy and Whore” by Jean Estache, illustrate the inevitability of disappointment after the inexorable evaporation of cocaine frenzy. If François has not yet managed to get rid of idealism, then the director, on the contrary, with all his remaining unchanged political views, appears in the tape as a realist, with deliberate meticulousness fixing on the monochrome moist everyday life of the French children of the new cultural revolution. Undoubtedly, “Permanent Lovers” is not without the magic of cinema, but this is not the infantile mania of “Dreamers” Bertolucci.
That is why, probably, the film, starting with a pathetic reconstruction of the riots (the narrative of such scenes will often be interrupted), is further deconstructed, splits into a heap of interpersonal drama in the squat, which does not require absolutely any editing razors of Occam due to the fact that it is here, in the confined spaces of the hippist apartment, where Garrel will place Francois and his beloved Lily, highlighting them from the general flow of young rebels, the general historical will be suppressed by private personal. It is not by chance that Niko will sound behind the scenes, and actress Clotilda Esme even looks like the main muse of the director in his most fruitful underground period. There will be no extra shots, editing phrases; the camera of William Lubchansky will literally penetrate into the inner world of the heroes, through the abundance of close-ups and play with light, showing and telling much more about them than they can say about themselves. Such a concentrated internal monologue of the director himself, who transports the audience to that delightfully unusual time, when it seemed that it was so easy to be revolutionaries, so easy to reject everything obsolete, so sweet to destroy the bourgeois, paradoxically not abandoning all the external attributes of the notorious life of the charming bourgeoisie. Moreover, in "Permanent Lovers" does not leave the feeling of a certain death melancholy, because Niko died just when the Red May has not yet gone out. And there will go Francois himself, a young poet, drug addict and revolutionary, a man of inaction, who squandered his life on lacunae and lost its meaning, who did not find his authenticity even at key moments in history and in general embodied the idea of Jacques Derrida that the death of authors does not wait for their death. But was the author Francois, that's the question?
