“Don’t forget to slam it good,” shouts the woman at her departing lover; with a contemptuous smile, he assents. It’s a pretty succinct way to end a movie about a fractious, fragmented relationship, but the relationship that’s ending isn’t actually that important: the slam isn’t meant for her.

The movie, meanwhile, is a wide-open portal into its creator’s past. Nouvelle Vague stalwart Philippe Garrel’s J’entends plus la guitare (getting some local run thanks to Cinematheque Ontario, 17 years after its initial release) probes its creator’s difficult relationship with the ill-fated singer/artist Nico.

As the film opens, Gerard (Benoit Regent) and his girlfriend Marianne (Johanna ter Steege) are vacationing at the seaside with friends; the days are a slow blur of pillow talk and tense existential conversation — the heady babble of the young and pretentious. When they get back to Paris, she splits, and he broods, waits, sleeps with somebody else, welcomes his beloved back, picks up her nasty heroin habit, and then suddenly there she goes again, off somewhere else, presumably doing superstar stuff.

Gerard is Garrel’s onscreen surrogate, and if there’s a more dourly unflattering self-portrait in the history of autobiographical cinema, I must have missed it. (His life is a succession of callow escapes as he pines for the one who is forever slipping away.) Marianne, of course, is Nico’s, and ter Steege’s performance elides impersonation entirely — she’s a marvel of sustained opacity.
The same can be said of the film as a whole. J’entends plus la guitare denies the audience traditional entry points (likeable characters, narrative development, a clearly demarcated timeline) and its pacing is (intentionally) deadly, yet it’s an utterly immersive piece of work. Garrel’s nakedly personal disappointment bleeds into an unsentimental elegy for an elegantly wasted generation. Instead of shallow self-pity, he gives us a melancholy deep enough to drown in.