To me, this movie is perfection.

Please don't spend money on this.

Excellent adaptation.

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

This is a very long movie, indeed. But it is quite beautiful, and a good example to show why cinema can be considered art. A story easily told cannot be expected in Les Amants Réguliers, but every scene, every silence here tells much more than a hundred dialogs. Touching, different, perfect in its pictures and soundtrack, showing why the close brought by the cinema as one of its main features became the greatest innovation in any dramatic representation. Someone who is used to that kind of movies where everything is told, and action takes place all the time, will find this tiring. But it is worth watching, to find out other possibilities of feeling a story.

This film is probably the best new French film I've seen in this century so far. There have been some great ones including Noe's Irreversible, Green's Le Pont des Arts and Hadzihalilovic's Innocencebut none of them come close to Les Amants Reguliers' timeless glory.The movie is a description of the events of May 68 and what followed in the wake of it and furthermore it is and update of, and a homage to, the Nouvelle Vague-movies of those days. Concerning the depiction of the riots in Paris the movie is meticulously accurate (I'm only 19 and I wasn't there myself but you know what I mean)and the almost real-time and very long riot scenes set the stage perfectly for the aftermath of the events in the streets of Paris. The riots are not glorified or beautifully photographed like the ones in Bertolucci's The Dreamers (to which the movie is comparable in many ways) instead they are filmed in grimy black and white shots courtesy of the excellent William Lubtchansky. The love story that is the movie's main concern after the riots in 68 is filmed in stunning and far less blurred shots and manages to evoke true feelings of love and adolescent confusion in the midst of the otherwise politically concerned and seemingly cold environment.This film is a beautiful love story and it radiates through it that the director wants to depict his own experiences of those mythical late 60's which makes the film all the more compelling. But the film is also a homage to the whole Nouvelle Vague canon. Much of the dialogue evokes early Truffaut, and the length and non-action and plot less structure is reminiscent of Eustache or Rivette. There are even Godard-like verfremdung-effects with the persons looking directly into the camera and even addressing Bernardo Bertolucci directly. This film is no doubt an answer song to Bertolucci's The Dreamers and it is also a Nouvelle Vague homage but still it stands by itself as a beautiful and radiant love story.Bottom line: This movie is incredible and if you love French cinema you shouldn't sleep on it. It may be the finest french film since Eustache's La Mamain et la Putain.

I saw this at the Toronto Inter. Film Festival in Sept. 2005. The description seemed intriguing--how wrong I was! This could easily be the worst movie I have ever seen--in 50 years! I see the director is my age (b. 1948) and lived with Nico of the Velvet Underground, which leads us to Andy Warhol, which coincidently is the one I thought of while watching this--Warhol's 24+ hour movies of nothing much happening. This is not art, this is boredom.Specifically: black & white. OK, maybe...but what is the purpose here? Surely they had color in 1968! And there is no contrast with the present. And yes, the subtitles were in white, naturally. I don't think I missed much, but that made about 20% of them illegible.Next, it's pure chronological order, but with seemingly random events thrown in. What's the purpose of the conversation with the old man at the dinner table? It adds nothing to the movie. There were many similar scenes--almost like someone took a camcorder and filmed random people and spliced them together to make a movie.Plot? None. The "riot" consists of some figures in the distance occasionally heaving a rock off screen. Mostly it's an excruciating length of time watching people (in the distance!) stand around. The repetitive opium smoking is just as boring. When the main character got a cute girlfriend, I perked up, but no, she was boring too! This is perhaps the only French film I've seen where no one takes off their clothes. Probably they were too bored to bother.Romance? None. The girl seems totally indifferent to everything--maybe her sculpture holds some interest, but if it does, we're not shown that. We are completely indifferent to the fate of the characters because they are all unappealing. Maybe that's the point of all this?

Philippe Garrel makes us breathe the forgotten atmosphere of the Nouvelle Vague, almost lost among the vestiges of its ancient splendor but ready to rise again from its ashes if recalled from the past. They who are a little acquainted with the director's subjects, on the other hand, may know very well how he's obsessed by a lingering sense of loss as far as fickleness of reality is concerned. "Les amants réguliers", therefore, show us the parallel stories of an "amour fou" and of a tempted revolution gone to ruin under the direction of young French students.The first part of the story is about the dramatic events of May '68 in France evoked in a series of astonishing plan-sequences, a sort of cinema verité style, that place the student insurrection in anything but an enviable light against a pitch-black background.There's much that can be said about the peculiarities of black-and-white photography used to describe the battle between students and police, where the high contrasts confer an unrealistic atmosphere to the sequences and darkness closes in upon the excited bodies wrapping them in mystery. The images, completely deprived of words, show the real consistence of the myth, made of crude violence, more and more emphasized by the exasperated reality of the movie shootings. The individual doesn't count anything at all here: he tends to disappear in the mass. What really matters in these fight scenes are the significance of the mass-suggestion, the blind fury of the juvenile assault, sinister eulogies of the power of the mob, even if conceived like separate entities apart from any kind of emotion, with the cold and distant look of an entomologist intent to catalog his insect collection.The second part of the story is described in a quieter and most intimate way. Stands out on the horizon the distressing portrait of a self-centered generation in search of its lost time, completely disenchanted about the individual values of men, inclined to rotate on its own axis between opium fumes and making a funeral oration in the praise of its recent defeat."Les amants réguliers" seems to evoke from time to time the shadow of the great Robert Bresson, revised and corrected by Garrel's particular sensibility without drifting away from the main argument, trying to expand overall perspectives on the subject of human disillusions that though painful may bring us to the truth. In my opinion, trying to penetrate deeply into the substrate of the story, if a man lets himself go and play things by ear, he probably will find that he can bring out the dark side of his self with dire and irretrievable consequences.