SOIXANTE-SLEEP Hesme and Garrel drift off.

Although Philippe Garrel has been making films for more than four decades, his ravishing latest is the first to receive a proper theatrical release in this country. (Special mention goes to BAMcinématek, which programmed a Garrel retro in 2005; a second installment is planned for later this year.) Ladies and gentlemen, it was well worth the wait. Regular Lovers is everything Bernardo Bertolucci’s risible The Dreamers is not—a luminous paean to Paris in ’68, love, youth and disillusionment.

Garrel, known as the Rimbaud of cinema, turned 20 in 1968—the same age as his tender poet protagonist, François (played by the director’s son Louis), who flees the cops during the Night of the Barricades in the film’s first hour; for the remaining two hours, François falls deeply in love with sculptor Lilie (Hesme, an exquisite amalgam of Chantal Goya and Patti Smith). “We’ll introduce each other to the things we really like. Sheer pleasure,” Lilie coos. Garrel is equally committed to the voluptuous, from the staggering beauty of the film’s images (lensed by William Lubtchansky) to the sheer burst of joy in its party scene (rivaling the electrically charged moments in Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water and Chantal Akerman’s Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels). But Garrel’s beautiful dreamers also break out into night sweats, their blissful reveries shifting painfully into the daze of disappointment. All of which is to say: The revolution will not be sentimentalized. (Opens Fri; Cinema Village. See also “The fire this time.”)—Melissa Anderson