Jean-Pierre Léaud and Judith Godrèche in Olivier Assayas’s Paris Awakens (1991)

“I’m better known in France for my early films,” Olivier Assayas told Nick Newman at the Film Stage in 2018. But in the U.S., the four features Assayas made before Cold Water (1994)—the film he repeatedly refers to as a “turning point” in a career that has given us two versions of Irma Vep (1996 and 2022), Summer Hours (2008), the miniseries Carlos (2010), and two collaborations with Kristen Stewart (Clouds of Sils Maria, 2014; Personal Shopper, 2016)—have been exceedingly difficult to track down. Tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Newman will present new restorations of the third and fourth features, Paris Awakens (1991) and A New Life (1993).

The son of Raymond Assayas, a screenwriter and director who worked under the name Jacques Rémy, and Catherine de Károlyi, a fashion designer, Assayas grew up steeped in cinema, writing for Cahiers du cinéma and making short films while still in his mid-twenties. Presenting a retrospective of his work in 2003, the Museum of Modern Art noted that Assayas “combines the ethical humanism of Jean Renoir with the romantic sentiment of Frank Borzage; the formal rigors of Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky with the kinetic electricity of Kenneth Anger; and the interiority of Ingmar Bergman and Hou Hsiao-hsien with the improvisatory daring of Andy Warhol and John Cassavetes.”

Paris Awakens features an original score by John Cale and a starring role for Jean-Pierre Léaud, an enthusiastic fan of Assayas’s first feature, Disorder (1986), the story of a post-punk band in deep trouble. In Paris Awakens, Léaud plays Clément, the father of nineteen-year-old Adrien (Thomas Langmann). The two haven’t seen each other in four years, and when Adrien appears at Clément’s door, he finds his father living with Louise (Judith Godrèche), who happens to be about Adrien’s age. Louise’s quest for her own independence has her switching sides over and again between the two men.

Writing for Film Comment in 2017, Assayas looked back on his work with Léaud in Paris Awakens: “I intuited that if I wanted to work with Jean-Pierre I would first have to write for him, and yet in writing for him I didn’t need to concern myself with crafting a tailor-made role. I needed to write a self-sufficient character, one who would have his own life and, insofar as the character was to be distinct from Jean-Pierre, the space separating the two would be inhabited, nourished by his infinite resources of humanity and—to use a word that I don’t much like, as it is used indiscriminately, and often very foolishly, in speaking about cinema as though it were an end in itself—emotion.”

For a 2003 Reverse Shot symposium on Assayas, cofounding editor Jeff Reichert briefly reviewed each of the four pre–Cold Water features. “For me,” he wrote, Paris Awakens is “most memorable for what I find the first truly ‘Assayas’ moment in his cinema. Midway through the film, a familiar bassline snakes its way into the end of a quiet, spinning love scene. We fade to black and cut to Louise who picks up the camera’s rotation through a crowded dance club floor just as the unmistakable guitar riff of the Pixies’ ‘Debaser’ takes up the call. The camera allows Louise to dance well into the song before cutting to Léaud and a few older friends trying in vain to converse over the music. Rock ’n’ roll, generation gaps, dance as catharsis (look for it again in Cold Water, Irma Vep, Les destinées sentimentales, and demonlover)—it all starts here.”

Reichert notes that Assayas wrote and shot A New Life as a three-hour film, but then sliced out about a third of the story at the editing table. “The result is full of scene transitions that feel like explosions threatening to rip the narrative to shreds,” wrote Reichert. “If Bresson was a point of reference before, here these elisions and a persistent interest in characters’ midsections and hands announce Assayas as perhaps his true heir.”

A New Life is a densely populated tale. Twenty-year-old Tina (Sophie Aubry) has a job in a supermarket warehouse, a sweet but unambitious boyfriend (Philippe Torreton), and a manic-depressive mother (Nelly Borgeaud). The father she’s never known (Bernard Verley) lends financial support on the condition that he’ll be left alone with his money. Tina breaks the rule, discovering that she has a half-sister, Lise (Judith Godreche), who has taken up with their father’s lawyer, Constantin (Bernard Giraudeau). Then “matters become infinitely more complicated,” as Todd McCarthy wrote in his review for Variety.

When the American Cinematheque presented an Assayas retrospective in 1998, the Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Thomas considered A New Life to be “one of the best” films in the program, and it’s “even more rewarding on a second viewing. You come away impressed by how well he knows his people in all their complexities.” As Thomas saw it at the time, Assayas’s “eternal theme” was “emotional risk, and he fills the screen with people who leave themselves vulnerable in the relentless pursuit of l’amour . . . For all its concern with grand passion, A New Life is no less concerned with moral choices and the value of taking chances, leaving us with the impression that in all aspects of life security is an illusion.”

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