A subtle, yet engaging and very moving coming-of-age drama by respected French director Olivier Assayas, whose previous credits include Summer Hours and the epic Carlos. The story begins in and around Paris in the early 1970s, shortly after a time of economic disruption and civil unrest which pit students and unions against the government of Charles de Gaulle. The film turns on a group of adolescent activists engaged in the brief revolution and the ways in which they change, unite, fall apart, and otherwise define themselves over the course of a season. Chief among them is an introverted artist and aspiring film director one cannot help but understand as at least partly autobiographical. The film is warm in its consideration of these characters, recognizing their desire to enact change and lead romantic lives of excitement and value, though it is also grounded, finding angst and humor in the well-intentioned hypocrisies of their comfortable revolution, as well as their shifting, often surface-level embrace of a catalog of ideologies. The political and social tensions are specific (the time and place is indeed brought to vivid, presumably authentic life here), but the overarching sensations and themes, from the pleasure and pain of teenage love to the challenge of forging a place in the adult world, are universal.

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