Rip off

It's funny you should say that. I was thinking of "The Devil Probably" several times while watching this film. If anything, I'd imagine it is partly an homage to that film rather then a rip off. I think this film is an homage to film itself, particularly French film of the past(Godard, Truffaut, etc.). I don't think that is a bad think, makes this any lesser of a film, and doubt that the director would deny the inspiration from the films of these other French directors.

Don't think of it as a rip-off... if you do, then everything by Godard is rendered utter crap.

One can't make a film about 1968 and cinephilia without heavily quoting New Wave, and pre-New Wave French cinema.

"Sometimes you have to take the bull by the tail, and face the truth." G. Marx

Echoing what has already been said, it's not a rip-off, it's Garrel's reconstruction of his own film footage.

Garrel - a rioter himself who manned barricades - voluminously shot live footage of the nightly riots as they were transpiring, but lost the footage, and Les Amants Réguliers was his attempt to reconstruct those images exactly the same way his camera eye recorded them.

Reconstructing memory and history is not the same as ripping off other filmmakers.

The cinema of the French New Wave was monophyletic because the directors shared the same film techniques and memories and experiences and points of view and history, all of which sprung from the same source (the rejection of the classical conservative paradigm in cinema and politics and social mores).

There's no ripping off, there's only riffing upon the same shared 'ancestral' theme.

You find this in all of the arts, painters who painted at the same time within the same vicinity whose paintings were extremely similar because they were fueled by the same upheavals, musicians who created music at the same time within the same vicinity whose music was extremely similar because the musicians were fueled by the same upheavals, writers who wrote novels and poems at the same time within the same vicinity whose writings were strikingly similar because their works were fueled by the same upheavals, etc.

Les Amants Réguliers is a homage perhaps, but that might be too generous a description because Garrel deliberately stripped his reconstruction of the romanticism and sentimentality and nostalghia that is inherent in a homage. The Dreamers is a strongly nostalghic homage. Les Amants Réguliers is, to paraphrase Garrel, a reconstruction of the losing side, born out of sadness, fought and lost by disillusioned youth, and retold by the loser in rebuttal to a classical homage called The Dreamers.

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