-- By Tom Phillips
 |
| Paris, May 1968 |
“In the Intense Now” is a pastiche of home movies,
travelogues and documentaries, from 1968 and the time just before that climactic
year. It includes snips and clips of revolutionary struggles in France,
Czechoslovakia, China and Brazil, with a moody voice-over by a Brazilian film-maker,
Joao Moreira Salles, who refrains from trying to pull it all together. It is diffuse, digressive, and at least a half-hour too long, but I’m glad I saw it, because the heart of
the film is a clash between two charismatic geniuses – “Danny the Red”
Cohn-Bendit, leader of the student uprising that convulsed France in May 1968, and
General Charles de Gaulle, President of the Republic, the great preserver of
bourgeois order. The outcome is foreordained; the struggle is elemental, ecstatic,
elegaic.
