This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Like many French movies, not a lot happens in this one. It follows a group of acquaintances for about a year. There are loves gained and lost, families who fight, and some who don't, secret affairs, and open ones, friends who sit around and talk in coffee shops, a lot of really mundane stuff. The bright spot is Virginie Ledoyen, who is just too pretty. (A cool thing is that French women seem to have discovered razors!!!) There is certainly a place for character studies, and slow-moving films. But this one failed to appeal to me on any level. Perhaps the language barrier was too much for me to overcome. I can't recommend this one.

I still didn't like this as much as "Demonlover" by a long stretch, but I thought it was a bit more well-executed than Irma Vep. The various aspects of Assayas's style are more fully integrated here, but I still find he has a tendency toward extended intellectual coffee shop dialogue (a la Godard) at times that I'm not crazy about, and which still doesn't mesh well with his penchant for moody visuals (in my opinion still is greatest strength). The film reminds me quite a bit of Michael Winterbottom's "Wonderland". Like that film, neither the characters nor the situations of the story are really that remarkable or interesting, but rather the movie derives it's strength from little fleeting moments. And also like Winterbottom, Assayas has an unfortunate tendency here to cut those moments slightly short. I found a number of times wanting scenes to continue longer than they did, building up more of that improvisational sense of intimacy, instead of frequently fading to black while the scene is still underway (similar to Winterbottom's "9 Songs"). Still, there are enough of those moments to make the film more than worthwhile. I definitely think it is Assayas's most approachable, warm film that I've seen. Not that I find he is necessarily a particularly cold or detached filmmaker ("Demonlover", if anything, may very well be a masterpiece of pure detachment and inhumanity, but I think that comes more from the concept of the film rather than the filmmaker, and "Irma Vep" was nothing if not a gushing love letter to his ex-wife, after all), but there seems to be a deliberate attempt in this film to capture something real and immediate, even if Assayas gets side tracked by the unfortunate boats of cerebral, intellectual café chatting.

In many ways, FIN AOUT, DEBUT DECEMBRE is a dismaying and disappointing experience. Assayas' IRMA VEP is the best French film of the last quarter century; thematically rich, stylistically remarkable, emotionally devastating. FIN AOUT is, in comparison, a rather drab handheld take on Eric Rohmer, filled with dull, aimless, middle-class intellectuals who have such 'financial problems' that they get their uncle to lend them his country villa; they whinge and emote in the most banal terms, in a plot that says nothing, and goes nowhere.This very drabness seems to be the film's theme. Although the title is very specific about time and the seasons, the film itself seems to exist in a timeless vacuum. Each episode has a temporal subtitle (e.g. 'six months later'), but no month is ever specified, and could therefore be any or none. This is not the film's failing, but that of the characters, who are locked in their own solipsism, flailing desperately, but unable to escape.Gabriel says of Adrien, the writer, that he was minor because he could only see the world from his limited viewpoint, but this is a much more general malaise - all the talk about friendship can't hide the fact that each character is fatally limited in perception of others, because of obsession with self (figured in the cramped interiors. The trips to the country are literally bursts of fresh air). This doesn't mean that Assayas isn't generous with his characters; he is probably kinder than some of them deserve (Gabriel in particular needs a good shaking). The search for an apartment, therefore, is not a trite subject - these rootless characters, forming their own community, are so desperate for a sense of place, home, that they search everywhere for it: the country, abroad, the past, death.FIN AOUT has in common with IRMA VEP a concern with the crisis of expression in this era of post-modernism. The crucial figure here is the writer, significantly a receptacle of death (the funeral is becoming a recurring motif in modern French cinema, as in THOSE WHO LOVE ME TAKE THE TRAIN); focus for all the other characters.The question is: in an age of pastiche and reproduction, is it possible to insist on authentic personal expression (the film's structure focuses on shifting series of pairs: uneasy doublings and reproductions). And does it matter that this person (both the director in IRMA VEP, and the writer here) is rather objectionable as a human being? Is the insistence on the personal elitist and restrictive?In IRMA VEP, these questions were urgently juggled up to the end, with no clear answers. Here, the writer is unrecognised until he dies, perhaps confirming our decadent reliance on the past, and our inability to come to terms with and express the present (although even this is undermined; as his publisher remarks on his perceived success, 'I wouldn't go that far'). Unlike the director in IRMA VEP, we get no example of Adrien's work, save a self-serving and cliched letter (significantly breaking up a relationship of the May/December type that has nearly killed French cinema). There is no transcendental moment, like the final sequence of IRMA VEP; in essence an archetypal post-modern artefact - a fragmentary, abandoned, incomplete, distorted, scratchy, uncontextualised piece of film; a haunting palimpsest from another age (a call to return to the beginnings of cinema, when possibilities were endless, before ossifying into the codes we are stuck with now?), it is also the locus for Assayas' faith in cinema, personal expression and emotion. This issue is left rather vague here, because we have no evidence with which to judge.Well, except this film, of course. It is this that raises the film - Assayas' complete, mature mastery of the medium. Although his material is banal, he electrifies and enlivens it with his style: the fluidity of his camera movements and editing; his emotional use of colour, light and space; his mastery of the techniques of melodrama; his intimate ability to capture, and make profound, every seemingly trivial, gesture; his enlarging every detail to convey and enrich meaning.Chris Darke has called FIN AOUT a cubist film, but it seems to me more like an obsessive Monet serial: the characters and place, for all their narrative perambulations, never seem to change, or resolve the problems that opened the film (even if they leave somewhere, it's back to somewhere they've been before), but Assayas' impressionistic eye, in capturing authentically the moment, asserts the beauty and depth of the transitory.In fact, the film's nearest comparisons, for all its cinematic brilliance, might be literary - especially Proust and Beckett - in its avoidance of the dramatic (the main death occurs off-screen) in favour of the phatic, the continuous and the elliptical, giving a truer account of lives dominated by lack (the film's opening credits have the actors' names split apart, figuring the personality crises that make up its content).I have been using a lot of superlatives, and here's another. Assayas is, along with Tim Burton, Takeshi Kitano and Wong Kar-Wai, the greatest director in the world: he has often been compared to the latter, although he can't quite reach Wong's offhand melancholy poetry just yet. FIN AOUT, than, is his HAPPY TOGETHER, an absolutely astonishing example of cinematic authority wasted on a rather monotonous psychodrama.

A beautiful and moving film filled with understated yet extremely rich, quietly complex character studies. The people in this film are so real, they don't seem like fictional characters at all and the movie has the natural rhythm of real life. The interaction and inter-connections are rare in movies. Often very funny, Late August, Early September is also quite heartbreaking. One of the best films in years.