Reviewed by Guy Clapperton
Stars Laetitia Casta. Yannick Renier, Yann Trégouët, Christine Citti, Marc Citti, Sabrina Seyvecou, Théo Frilet, Edouard Collin, Kate Moran, Fejria Deliba, Matthias Van Khache
Written by Oliver Ducastel & Jacques Martineau
Certification UK 18
Runtime 173 minutes
Directed by Oliver Ducastel & Jacques Martineau
The strapline for Born In 68 bodes well – “Forty years of riots and celebrations, the birth of free love and the onslaught of AIDS. A generation that experienced it all.” Sounds good – if only that generation could be a bit reined in when it comes to making movies about it. “Born in 68” was originally intended as a couple of TV movies and at 173 minutes there’s insufficient evidence of it being cut enough to watch in a single sitting.
Of course there are long films that work, but these follow a few basic precepts. First they have some engaging characters; Laetitia Casta’s Catherine is a beautifully measured performance and the maturing of the character is finely observed, but Catherine is so self-indulgent it’s difficult to give a damn about her until almost two hours into the film.
The story is all about the backdrop. The French riots in 1968 give rise to some odd friendships and a bunch of these friends go off to form a commune. Everyone seems to be in it for themselves and all bar three of the characters are pretty much ciphers – the dishonest guy who makes off with their money (and is promptly forgotten), the leftie who storms off because of a class-war chip on his shoulder (and is forgotten again), the layabouts who just sing all day (who we don’t even see leave but it’s OK, we’re not given any reason to care). One of the more interesting characters, Hervé (Yann Trégouët), gets in trouble with the police and is the only character to return to the movie later; he, Catherine and Yves, played by Yannick Renier, are the only people with any discernable impact in the opening part of the film.
And it’s a long opening part which pretty much goes nowhere. The people are self-indulgent, hedonistic and shallow. Only later on, when the kids they inevitably produce grow up, the son turns out to be gay and obligingly contracts AIDS, does the movie catch light. Given a meaty plot at last and some actual emotion to show, the performers and director show what they can do and it’s excellent. Actually scratch that; it’s a reminder of how good a tighter film could have been, so it’s frustrating too.
The performances aren’t the only bright spot in an overlong epic. It’s beautifully shot, with the rural landscape almost becoming a character in its own right. Details niggle, though. Make-up does a convincing job of ageing the characters as the narrative moves from 1968 to the current decade, but then forgets that if someone has been working on a farm for a few years you need to roughen their hands a bit or it looks sloppy. The subtitlers were presumably French; English idiom is bypassed often in favour of a direct translation which sounds clunky, and whoever distracted the audience by constantly putting references to Catherine’s son Boris having ‘AIDES’ ought to be taken out and fired.
For all that, I was waiting for the big revelation, the one that made sitting through all of this beautifully made self-indulgence worth watching, but it never comes. This has to be the standout criticism of the piece; for all the trimmings, good and bad, it’s all been said before. In the closing shot Yves sees some protestors, some quasi-revolutionaries who think they’re the first people to protest about anything. Presumably the idea is that we go away and reflect that these ‘revolutions’ go through the generations and are nothing new. Sadly it also reminds us that the same is true of ‘story of a generation’ movies. I’ve seen this too many times.