106 min | R | April 15, 2022 | IFC Films
Three twentysomethings in a high-rise corner of Paris circle each other through hookups, dead-end jobs, and webcam screens. Jacques Audiard films it in cool black and white and lets the wanting do the work. It watches its lovers more than it ever touches them.
The Olympiades is a cluster of high-rise towers in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. Émilie rents the spare room of her apartment to Camille. They start sleeping together before they learn anything else about each other. Camille later crosses paths with Nora, a law student who left Bordeaux to start over, and Nora carries her own entanglement with a webcam performer named Amber. The film braids these lives into a study of people who acquire sex with ease and intimacy almost never. It is about a generation fluent in connection and starved of it.
Lucie Zhang plays Émilie with restless bravado that never quite hides the loneliness underneath. She picks fights and picks up men with the same reflex. Makita Samba plays Camille as a man whose charm runs ahead of his honesty. He says the right things and means almost none of them. Noémie Merlant plays Nora with exposed nerves, a woman remaking herself at thirty-three after a humiliation drives her out of school. Jehnny Beth plays Amber, the webcam performer Nora is mistaken for, and turns a face on a screen into the most direct person in the film.
Jacques Audiard directs from a script he wrote with Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius, adapting several short stories by the American cartoonist Adrian Tomine. Paul Guilhaume shoots the film in crisp black and white, which strips the graphic-novel color out of Tomine’s panels and turns the towers of the Olympiades into a stack of cool gray geometry. The monochrome flattens the city into surfaces and reflections, and the bodies on screen carry the only warmth. Audiard builds the three storylines in episodes rather than a single braid, letting weeks drop away between scenes. The structure observes its characters from a deliberate distance. The camera studies them more than it inhabits them.
This is a confident film about young people that keeps its own pulse low. The episodic build gives each relationship room to shift, but it also drains momentum from the spaces in between. Audiard finds real tenderness in the final stretch, when his characters stop performing and start admitting what they want. The cool surface is the point and also the limit. The film sees its lovers clearly and holds them at arm’s length, and it never fully closes that gap.