A Filmmaker’s Rebellious Teenagers, Take 1

Tiziana Fabi/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Olivier Assayas at the Venice Film Festival in September.

Hitchcock and “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” DeMille and “The Ten Commandments”: filmmakers sometimes take a second run at their own material. For the French director Olivier Assayas, “Something in the Air,” which opens in New York next Friday, is a double look back, revisiting his 1994 film “Cold Water” and, like that earlier film, incorporating elements of his own early 1970s adolescence.

On Saturday night 92Y Tribeca is offering a double bill of the two films. It’s an opportunity to preview “Something in the Air,” but the most exciting thing about the program is simply the chance to see “Cold Water,” a beautiful, sad, enchanting film that’s out of print on DVD in the United States and not legally available online.

The new film is not a remake of “Cold Water” (“L’eau froide”), but the connections are overt. Both center on rebellious teenagers named Christine and Gilles; both begin with a title indicating that the setting is near Paris in 1972. But where “Something in the Air” is a wider look at post-1968 counterculture, “Cold Water” is resolutely close-up. The anger and violence of the times are implicit, the unseen backdrop for a tightly woven story of young love moving inexorably toward tragedy.

“Cold Water’s” tone and style combine intense romanticism with an almost classical reserve as we see Christine and Gilles in action â€" shoplifting records, zoning out in class or baiting a weary policeman â€" and learn about their broken families. The shoplifting starts a chain of events that ends with Christine locked in a clinic with the misleading name Beausoleil.

She escapes and meets Gilles at a rave-like party at an abandoned country house, and the ensuing half-hour scene, a complex and fantastical sequence of running, dancing and pillaging lighted by leaping bonfires and set to English-language pop songs â€" “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” â€" is the best-known thing about the movie, and perhaps a little overrated.

The party scene is a tour de force, but what you notice on repeat viewings is Mr. Assayas’s technique and ingenuity in quieter moments â€" the way institutional settings like jails, schools and clinics are seen through grimy windows or half-drawn shades that obscure and cut off adult authority figures; the way a scene in which a teacher reads aloud a seamy passage from Rousseau’s “Confessions” is echoed by a scene of Gilles walking through the woods chanting Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra.”

As a final inducement, “Cold Water” offers an unaffected, touching performance by Virginie Ledoyen, 17 when the film was released, as Christine, whose disappointments â€" in her parents, in Gilles, in life â€" drive the story and whose obduracy leads to its cryptic yet devastating ending.

Mr. Assayas’s achievement is to get thoroughly inside the world of Christine and Gilles without surrendering to their point of view or caricaturing the adults around them. He makes palpable their fragility and frustration but doesn’t push us to agree with them or, worse, pity them. “Cold Water” accomplishes a feat that’s often tried but seldom attained: it’s completely intense and completely, omnisciently cool.