Paris s’éveille (1991) - film review

19-year old Adrien leaves his mother in Toulouse after becoming mixed up in a theft.  He heads for Paris where he hopes his estranged father, Clément, will offer him a helping hand.  Clément, a middle-aged adolescent, can do little for him.  He is more preoccupied with his wayward girlfriend Louise, who is barely older than Adrien and seems to live in a dream-world fuelled by drug addiction.  The inevitable happens.  Adrien falls in love with Louise and takes her away from Clément, but he soon realises that she is too much to handle.  As Louise’s fantasies take hold, Adrien finds himself drawn into another crime spree…

Olivier Assayas’ third full-length film combines some of the elements of a noir thriller and a conventional French love triangle but presents them as a gritty social realist drama.  Stylistically, the film is probably the director’s most inspired and satisfying film to date; it offers a brutally stark, convincing picture of disaffection and solitude in a society that has lost its moral sense and identity.   There is little to distinguish the forty-something Clément (Jean-Pierre Léaud at his best) from the youngsters Louise and Adrien (portrayed superbly by Judith Godrèche and Thomas Langmann).  All three are eternal adolescents who seem incapable of self-development, stuck in a groove from which there is no escape.  The outside world offers them nothing to enable them to grow, and so they are trapped, weak, vulnerable orphans of an unceasing storm.  But appearances are deceptive and the film shows that escape is sometimes possible, that happy endings (of a kind) do happen, sometimes.  It’s a truthful, understated work, with an engaging story and believable characters, untarnished by the self-conscious excesses that would mar some of Assayas’ later films.

© James Travers 2007

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