Anyone besotted with the allure of French cinema in the late 1960s will take to “Regular Lovers” like refined absinthe. Shot in 2004 and shown at the 2005 New York Film Festival, the film is celebrated French director Philippe Garrel’s remembrance of revolutions past — or, rather, an autobiographical flashback to the days and weeks just after the failed populist uprisings in the Paris of May 1968.

Mr. Garrel’s lengthy, discursive films are among the talkiest and most solipsistic of his talky, solipsistic contemporaries, and he’s circled around the aftermath of that period several times. Both “The Inner Scar” (1972), in which he co-starred with his onetime lover, Nico, and “I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar” (1991), are unsparing incisions into the bohemian mindset, which can only expose broken hearts and the stoned-out consciousness that came of this despair.

Though it’s nearly three hours long, “Regular Lovers” is the most readily accessible of Mr. Garrel’s works. There’s already a template in place: Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” (2003), which the screenplay slyly references as a kind of glossy, superficial prequel. The director’s son, Louis Garrel, was part of the tragic love triangle of the earlier film, and returns here about where Mr. Bertolucci’s story ended: at the start of the Parisian riots. This is mostly played at a remove (and for the better part of an hour) with scant dialogue, establishing a lingering, lifelike rhythm that is one of the director’s signatures.

As François, his father’s stand-in, the young actor has an equally potent screen presence, playing an intense 20-year-old poet who evades the military draft and then spends the rest of the film in a philosophical drift, often in the luxe apartment his friend Antoine has inherited, passing around the opium pipe. The title alludes to his relationship to Lilie (Clotilde Hesme), a beautiful, slightly older sculptress who abides as an emotional focus — a prism through which to observe François and his circle as they grapple with their collective spiritual hangover.

The film gloriously enmeshes the audience in the simple gorgeousness of high-contrast black-and-white cinematography, holding shots for extended durations in close-ups and long shots. There’s a rapturous gleam in the way half-moon slivers of light melt from faces into the charcoal darkness captured by the cinematographer, William Lubtchansky. The lovers, in their scruffy jeans, white shirts, and black jackets, cast lean profiles and pose with an equine grace, doppelgangers for the Patti Smith that Robert Mapplethorpe shot for the cover of her album “Horses,” by way of vintage Cocteau.

“Regular Lovers” is awash in such resonances. They arrive without effort and pass as if a dream. Such pleasure is rare in Mr. Garrel’s films. He has notable enthusiasts, such as the French director Olivier Assayas, who lauds his gift for “a poeticism that [is] hallucinatory and visionary.” But his characters (most often played by real-life friends, lovers, and family members) often test the patience of even the most sympathetic viewer. Not so “Regular Lovers.” Its leisurely unfolding scenes feel generous rather than indulgent, and when nothing ever really seems to happen, it does so in a manner that seems charmed, even as ideals dither into the atmosphere like smoke in a café — accompanied by the spare notes of a piano on the soundtrack.

Midway through, the director is wise to offer an ecstatic moment, a nightclub dance sequence set to the Kinks’ “This Time Tomorrow.” The song, naturally, winds up posing the same existential question as the film, which winds toward a conclusion that is as elegiac as it is inevitable.

“I miss the peace, the quiet lightness that of this life a mirror makes,” François tells Lilie early on, as he woos her by reciting the poet Musset, ” where all is painted in an instant and on which everything glides.” The line aptly describes the pleasure of “Regular Lovers.” Philippe Garrel holds up a mirror to his life and times, and gives us a poignant, rhapsodic glimmer of what was, and what will never be.