Fernanda 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.

Paul Martin This is one of many films I have seen at the Melbourne French Film Festival 2006. I average 100 films a year on the big screen and this is only the third film I have ever walked out on (after 75 minutes).Yes, it looks absolutely beautiful. Cinematography and lighting are great. The characters all look authentic and you'd swear you were watching a film made 30 or more years ago. It looks like a piece of art, but for me cinema is all about telling a story. And that's where this film falls apart - all style and no substance.There is no story, nothing compelling. It was so laborious to watch and a struggle to stay awake. There was little to differentiate this film from just looking at a book of old European photography (and that's not what I go to a cinema for, as much as I love photography). I felt that if it was like this after 75 minutes, how can I sit here for 3 hours! Obviously many others felt the same way because about 10% of the audience left before us. The only other time that I have seen a walkout like this was with The Aristocrats. This film was a wasted opportunity.

z-olmek I saw this film last night and came online specifically to see if others thought it was as awful as I did.Granted, obviously some people see a lot in this film that I didn't, so if you're one of those people, fine - good luck to you. But I'm a patient person. I've enjoyed extremely long films before. But this was an exercise in torture for me.I honestly felt that this was one of those films with little to say, and that it was more about style than substance - however, the style, too, made me feel like tearing my hair out. Pretty much anything interesting that happens during the course of the film happens OFF-SCREEN. It's like a deliberate attempt to make a film entirely from outtakes - the bits that would usually be reserved for the deleted scenes section of a DVD, if they were shown to the public at all.You don't even get to find out, in the end, ANYTHING about the main character, Francois. I had no sympathy for any of the characters in this film, except perhaps the violinist & his goat, and the old man who believes that octopuses live to 300 because they're really smart. Seriously, I was excited when it cut to a shot of Francois holding a gun to his head. I felt so ripped off when even his inevitable suicide turned out to be gut-wrenchingly boring.Oh, and where was the editor? Off smoking opium, too? I swear, I almost screamed every time I was subjected to an extended shot of absolutely nothing happening, except perhaps someone pacing backwards and forwards, and then FINALLY there would be a very abrupt cut to the next scene, and it would be A YEAR LATER, and WE'D MISSED EVERYTHING INTERESTING THAT HAPPENED IN THE MEANTIME, and everyone was STILL wearing the SAME BLOODY CLOTHES....!?!?!???So, in conclusion, if you liked it - great. But this review is intended as an antidote to the fawning "you'll love this film if you love cinema" dross I've seen posted here and elsewhere. (See? I hated the film and I STILL included a sly winking reference to its content!)

Aquilant 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.