Weight in measure

Italo Calvino once described his primary working method as "the subtraction of weight," an idea that also animates the latest film from the forty-four-year-old French director Olivier Assayas. Late August, Early September, which opens in New York in early July, is a story about suffering and death, but one infused with an extraordinary degree of lightness and spontaneity, stemming in part from the film's elliptical construction and loosely sketched characters. This effortless quality is the result of years of exploration on Assayas's part. He studied painting and literature, then wrote film criticism and screenplays before making his first feature, a stylized teen psychodrama entitled Disorder (1986). This first effort led to a string of inventive narratives featuring young people on the edge, including Winter's Child (1989) and Paris at Dawn (1991). After enjoying an international festival bit with his 1996 Irma Vep - an exhilarating meditation on cinema past and present, starring Hong Kong actress Maggle Cheung - Assayas turned his attention to HHH (1997), a documentary about the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Late August, Early September follows several thirty-something intellectuals - in particular Gabriel, a budding writer - as they grapple with the terminal illness of a slightly older member of their circle, the novelist Adrien. After Adrien's death, his friends discover that he bequeathed his most treasured possession, a Beuys stag drawing, to his sixteen-year-old lover, Vera. This briefly glimpsed object becomes an elusive emblem of creativity and regeneration. If Disorder's disaffected teens were drawn to death like moths to a flame, Assayas's latest film addresses what he calls "the obscene way that life has of continuIng," an inexorable flow embodied in restless camerawork and the delicate, watercolor-like quality of his image.

As Late August, Early September opened In Paris last February, Cahiers du Cinema published Assayas's In Praise of Kenneth Anger: True and False Magic in the Cinema, a monographic look at the self-styled magus of avant-garde cinema - and author of Hollywood Babylon (1975) - whom Assayas greatly admires. In fact, Assayas's pursuit of a variety of influences, ranging from Robert Bresson to Andy Warhol, reflects a healthy spirit of experimentation within French filmmaking. - KJ

KRISTIN JONES: How did you come to make Late August, Early September?

OLIVIER ASSAYAS: It's been a long process, and it's very much connected to my going through a period during the late '80s, early '90s, when three of my friends died from AIDS. Everything that was being said about death made me uneasy because it didn't relate to my own experience. We're afraid of mortality, but the dead endure in strange ways - through their work, through people who've come to know them. The film grew out of the idea that it's more interesting to show death from the survivors' viewpoint. The opposite produces pathos - even if the dying person is strong and courageous, it becomes melodramatic. It could have stayed in my drawer, but I kept adding touches, and it became a magnet for many daily experiences.

I realized I had to make the film after a process I went through of radically changing my conception of the relationship between real life and art. During the early part of my career I viewed cinema as a separate world of emotions and ideas - obviously, it was connected to my life, but there was a border somewhere. I suddenly thought, "Why not use characters from real life, mix in nonprofessionals and see what happens?" These ideas arose when I was directing Cold Water [1994], a TV movie about teenagers. Working with kids was far lighter than working with professionals, and dealing with my own adolescent ideals and emotions during the '70s brought many things to life. Until then everything had seemed very clear, but suddenly there were new dimensions in reach. Late August, Early September is where it's all been leading, in that I was able to move much further away from conventional storytelling.

KJ: Were you influenced by Hou Hsiao-hsien's movies? I'm thinking of the elliptical construction, the naturalistic details, the characters whose lives ate changing. . .

OA: Hou's work, yes, but even more than that, Chinese dramaturgy in general, which involves a particular way of describing time, of describing the progression of action: You'll have fragments of the same reality, and sometimes time is not moving. I felt the reality of the central character in Late August, Adrien, is just a combination of different points of view, all completely valid.

KJ: You recently said you're becoming more and more interested in the "absolute subjectivity of language." This seems to be reflected in the various discussions about writing in Late August, Early September, for example, when Gabriel asks, "Can stories really describe the world?" Do such questions reflect doubts you yourself have wrestled with?