Late August, Early September1999
Late August, Early September (1999)
Late August, Early September Photos
Movie Info
Cast
as Adrien
as Gabriel
as Anne
as Jenny
as Jeremie
as Maryelle
as Lucie
as Vera
as Thomas
as Axel
as Editor
as Hattou
Critic Reviews for Late August, Early September
All Critics (22) | Top Critics (8) | Fresh (18) | Rotten (4)
Assayas's sense of how relationships evolve between people over time is conveyed with a rich and vivid novelistic density.
A kaleidoscopic but engrossing study of the shifting sands of friendship among a group of Parisians.
It's a bit like a Woody Allen film without the kvetching or the wisecracks, but younger and more vital.
The film doesn't leave the audience with a moral. It just leaves a sense of having been in the stimulating company of passionate people.
The cast, including Virginie Ledoyen, François Cluzet, and Mathieu Amalric, is as well coordinated as a fine chamber-music ensemble; their entrances and vanishings and re-entries play like recurring motifs.
It is, in many ways, a modest film. But a director who offers glimpses of life that are recognizable in both detail and texture isn't so common that we can afford to overlook what he has achieved here.
Audience Reviews for Late August, Early September
I see the word "sublime" used in reference to this movie. Sublime is not the word I'd choose here. If anything, I'd place this in the anti-sublime camp. If there is any kind of transcendence in this film -- outside of death, it comes at the very end, where Vera, the 16-year-old ex-lover of the 41-year-old Adrien appears to finally find true happiness with a boyfriend in her own age range.
To qualify as sublime, I think a work needs to be rising above the mundane, the quotidian, the commonplace. I associate it with some kind of happiness, with joy, with a space positively positioned above the fray of the everyday. Rogers and Astaire dancing above all, every time they dance, is a sublime activity, for instance, elevating them almost into the realm of surreal bliss, both for them and for the audience. Ironically, the only real joy that can be found in this story is the joy of Vera dating a boy her own age -- what might be considered commonplace in any "normal" context.
This story reminds me of a pinball machine, with characters, none of them very thrilled with their lives, bouncing off of each other in a kind of random existential dance. In pinball, the downer is game over, the end of the game. Here, again almost ironically, the end of game is signaled by a pure expression of love at the close.
Super Reviewer
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