“Something in the Air” is not necessarily a film about revolutions. This seems somewhat misleading because the movie begins with a rather raw and violent clash between French high schoolers and police. Gilles (Clement Metayer), a budding artist, and his peers are heavily involved in the underground student movement. They read Marx, print provocative posters, vandalize the school’s walls, throw Molotov cocktails and spout idealisms in the pursuit of some type of liberation. But the ideals that propelled this bunch in the beginning begin to dissipate amid the snares of young love and creative expression.

After an instance of vandalism lands the group in hot water, the scenes shift. The industrial grays and suburban beiges of France are supplanted by the poetic greens and languorous blue skies of rural Italy. Gilles soon becomes enamored with the beautiful firebrand Christine (Lola Creton) as the discussions of rebellion dissolve into silent sequences of painting au naturale, nude sailing and drunken, bohemian carousing. The group’s intent is no longer clear and as such, neither is the film’s.

Unlike “Grin Without a Cat” — Chris Marker’s famous 1977 film of the French New Left — or Bernardo Bertolucci’s seductive vision of the ’68 protests in “The Dreamers,” “Something in the Air” is, as the title indicates, neither here nor there. Like the majority of its second half, there is bountiful lingering with minimal momentum. For all the shots of heated, political rhetoric, there is no payoff. There only seems to be the superficial allure of beautiful, young Europeans and the grandeur of aesthetic merriment.

Perhaps this is to Assayas’ benefit. His previous works, particularly his film “Summer Hours” and his mini-series “Carlos,” have all displayed a keen sense of control, precision and nuanced intellect. “Something in the Air” is no different. The historical detail is spot-on, the sense of malaise both appropriate and contemplative. And yet this lack of radical urgency not only derails the political investment of the characters but also the emotional investment of the audience.

Even as the students hash out their socialist philosophies at the film’s outset, it is never clear what the stakes are. Yes, there is present violence. Yes, there is a vaguely oppressive system in place. But, for the most part, Assayas forces the audience to question their empathy for these youths: Are they naive? Self-indulgent? Justified? Again, there is no clear solution. The characters seem aloof and so does Assayas.

After the screening scene, the camera cuts to a party. Gilles still doesn’t understand why “revolutionary syntax is the style of the bourgeoisie.” One of the producers responds bluntly, “Forget style.” But, as the audience, we can’t. Because for all the talk spouted in “Something in the Air” about individuals, there is no connection to Gilles. He is cold, emotionless and, like his fading ideals, without a striking center. He is, like the film, all style.

Contact Jessica Pena at jpena@dailycal.org.

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Born in 1941 to the poet and film critic Attilio Bertolucci, young Bernardo was raised in a world of lyrical expression. By the age of 21, he was already an award-winning novelist with a burgeoning film career on the horizon. Released in 1962, his first feature, “The Grim Reaper” (“La commare secca”) explored the criminal undercurrent of human behavior with a Rashomon-esque tale centered around the murder of a prostitute. Though perhaps derivative in plot, the combination of blunt brutality and overt sexuality in “The Grim Reaper” forged what would become the definitive style of Bertolucci’s early career — violent sensuality. Working within the contemporary framework of Italian Neorealism and the emergent French New Wave, Bertolucci’s films focus on the moral and emotional dilemmas of individuals within a turbulent society.

Films like 1964’s “Before the Revolution” combines these threads of unfettered cruelty and individual attention within a larger historical and political consciousness. After WWII, with the fall of Fascism and Mussolini, the state of personal and national identity was in flux. Likewise, characters in Bertolucci’s earlier films encapsulate this conflicted complex. They are personal stories that mirror the deep-set fears and ambiguities of the postwar, modern world. In “Before the Revolution,” upper class Fabrizio struggles between his old world, bourgeois origins and his progressive, idealist views of the new as he embarks upon an affair with a sultry, older woman. For Fabrizio, his story becomes as ambiguous and difficult to define as Bertolucci’s career.

Though they contain those trademark traits of unabashed sexuality, politics and ferocity, Bertolucci’s films are as varied in their genre as they are in style. From a documentary on the distribution of Middle Eastern oil (1967’s “The Path of Oil) to a sumptuous biopic of Pu Yi, China’s last emperor, Bertolucci’s range proves that the only consistency in his career as in life is uncertainty. In his latest feature, 2004’s “The Dreamers,” the almost incestuous twins, Isabelle and Theo (Eva Green and Louis Garrel) indulge in the hedonistic pleasures of film and sex only to have their innocent world destroyed by the social revolutions of May 1968 in France. The camera observes and invades their personal lives as the world outside them comes crashing down. Their future is unknown and their past is puzzling, but this is the way film works for Bertolucci ― mysterious and seductive.

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