Something in the Air, review Oliver Assayas's cinematic memoir of 1971, set three years after the 1968 student rebellions which forever changed the social temperature of France, is no rib-tickling riot. If this coming-of-age depiction is to be believed, there was never a generation that took itself so achingly seriously. Gilles (Clement Metayer) is a Paris high school student drawn with some classmates into radical left-wing street protests, which result in violent clashes with the police. He and his friends, Christine (Lola Creton) and Alain (Felix Armand), continue the campaign with revolutionary graffiti on their school building, and petrol bomb attacks upon the guards: they are playing with fire, both in reality and metaphor. A directionless quality pervades the story, which makes it hard to feel any great empathy with the characters. They seem - unlike the proletariat of whom they so often speak - to have considerable luxury of choice about their future. Yet if this film is weak on plot, it is particularly strong on atmosphere: Assayas lovingly recreates a time when youth thought very differently about itself and its place in the world. Gilles and his friends are intensely political, romantic, humourless but hungry for experience: it is a portrait of a late adolescence largely free from the modern influences of irony and pornography. There is a tangible pleasure to be had here simply from absorbing the organic quality of a youth in which exchanging books, poems and vinyl records was the most urgent form of communication. It is beautifully shot, too: even the writing on the posters and graffiti observes the style of classical French écriture. Given enough time, maybe one could even grow nostalgic for the pomposity.