Day 7: Nirvana

Finally, a masterpiece — two of them, in fact.

Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers begins with an event that has become one of the sociopolitical touchstones of the 20th century — the May, 1968 uprisings in which all of France was momentarily gripped by countercultural fervor — before going on to ponder why those sentiments lingered all too briefly in the public consciousness. What if, the movie asks, you start a revolution and nobody comes — or, at least, stays?

It is the story of Francois (played by the director's actor son, Louis Garrel), who has dodged his compulsory military service and who aspires to be a poet, and it is about how he is torn by the conflicting desires to make love or to make revolution. And while attentive viewers may recall that the lanky Garrel fils previously played a young man caught up in the events of '68 in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, whereas that movie used history as the backdrop for a nostalgic-romantic fantasy, Regular Lovers is like a long, intoxicating drag from a revolutionary pipe lit 37 years ago and still smoldering today. This movie gets into your bloodstream and it lingers there.

You don't merely watch this movie, you live it, right alongside its characters. We are there, in the quartier latin, during a midnight confrontation between rioters and police that unfolds in something resembling real time; at a party, as a great, shifting mass of bodies sways in the half-light to the rhythms of The Kinks singing "This Time Tomorrow" — maybe one of the most arrestingly sensual moments I've ever seen in a movie; and with Francois and his girlfriend Lilie (stunning newcomer Clotilde Hesme) as they traverse the streets of a Paris that seem unusually quiet and uninhabited — as if a private oasis that reveals itself only to those in love and flush with the belief that they can change the world.

Paris, of course, was not the only place in the world that was stirring with unrest at this moment. An ocean away, French-speaking Canada was too, and it provides the backdrop for director Michel Brault's 1967 debut feature, Entre la mer et l'eau douce, which screened as this year's selection of Toronto's Canadian Open Vault program — a festival sidebar devoted to the presentation of classic works of the Canadian cinema.

The film takes place in a moment: As a folk singer named Claude (real-life singing star Claude Gauthier) performs in a sold-out Montreal concert hall, he flashes back to key events from his past, including his journey from his small home town of St. Irenee and his relationship with a young waitress (Genevieve Bujold), herself from L'Abord-a-Plouffe, who is willing to give more openly of herself than Claude is ready to receive. Shot in stunning, full-frame black-and-white compositions, with an often handheld camera, it is, like many key films of the late 1960s and early '70s (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Mother and the Whore) a study in drift and discontentment, of a nation and its young people yearning for freedom and senses of self. And it is one of the most exquisitely pained and exhilarating of them all.

Brault is considered a major figure in Canadian cinema, French-speaking or otherwise, but his work is difficult to see and only one of his feature films has been released on DVD. With any luck, the pristine new print of Entre la mer... struck for this screening will help cause retrospectives to be mounted.

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