I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore (1991)
I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore (1991)
(J’entends plus la guitar, Philippe Garrel, France 1991, 98 min., 35mm, French w/subtitles)
Philippe Garrel. “We were what we were, and now we are not, and that’s that.”
Completed in the aftermath of Nico’s sudden death in 1988, I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore is Philippe Garrel’s tribute to the relationship that so profoundly marked him and his art. Johanna ter Steege is the stand-in for Nico; Benoît Régent is the Garrel substitute; and we see them through happiness/dependence, heroin-fueled breakdowns, and the building of independent lives.
The film is “. . . about surviving youth, surviving in an age where everything you stood for, believed in, dreamed of, has been crushed” (Olivier Assayas).