Born in ’68

Born in ’68 was one of the more frustrating films screened at this year’s Sacramento French Film Festival, a two-part TV production formed into an initially brilliant, eventually interminable three-hour drama. The first half of the film concerns a trio of ’60s radicals who retreat to a commune in the south of France. Unlike most nostalgia pieces of that era, it’s more concerned with developing the characters (including Laetitia Casta, very strong as the den-mother activist who lives with two men) than in scoring cheap nostalgia points. The risible second half tracks the next generation of leftists by using them as ornamentation in every pop-culture “event” of the last 30 years. One particular low point: A homosexual couple talks about marriage and adoption before the camera pulls back to reveal the smoking twin towers on television.