We’re back in 1981 — among placards, lapel badges and whooping young people. François Mitterand, a socialist, has just been elected president of France.
It isn’t a date that resonates much now — certainly not outside France — but the palpable sense of excitement in the opening scene of Mikhael Hers’s Berlin Film Festival competition entry The Passengers Of The Night suggests we are about to take a sweeping look at lived history.
On to 1984, with Lloyd Cole’s “Rattlesnake” playing over a carefree scene of two boys on bicycles; again, there is the remembrance of things not long past.
After that, there is more of a sense of history abandoned as the story closes in on Elisabeth (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her children: university student Judith (Megan Northam) — whose interest in a broader world will soon take her out of the household to a communal flat, her activism barely discussed — and son Matthias (Quito Rayon-Richter), an earnest, decent boy of 14.
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