My Gold­en Days – first look review

Like a great jazz soloist, French writer/​director Arnaud Desplechin has the dex­ter­i­ty to whisk melo­di­ous, com­pelling and live­ly dra­ma out of thin air. His best works, such as 2008’s A Christ­mas Tale or 1996’s Ma Vie Sex­uelle… are cin­e­mat­ic whirligigs which dance and spin in all direc­tions. And yet, they charge for­ward with an always-cogent sense of inter­nal momen­tum and, by the final frames, are revealed as com­plete and tight­ly focused stud­ies of how even the most exquis­ite­ly artic­u­lat­ed of ​“pen­sées” can’t always amply express the desul­to­ry nature of human desire.

Had it been a more star-span­gled affair, and maybe if his pre­vi­ous fea­ture, the peg-legged psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cal mem­o­ry patch­work, Jim­my P, had not been met with such out­right abhor­rence in 2013, you could’ve eas­i­ly seen My Gold­en Years as being one of the most beloved films to play in the 2015 Cannes com­pe­ti­tion. Alas, it wasn’t to be this year (“Too many French films already, yo,” sez artis­tic direc­tor Thier­ry Fré­maux), but the competition’s loss is the Director’s Fort­nights gain, and fol­low­ing on from open­ing film In The Shad­ow of Women by Philippe Gar­rel, the Fort­night is qui­et­ly rac­ing ahead in the qual­i­ty stakes.

This film cap­tures the for­ma­tive adven­tures of anthro­pol­o­gy stu­dent Paul Dedalus, first intro­duced in Ma Vie Sex­uelle… and played by Desplechin man­qué, Math­ieu Amal­ric. It’s a pre­quel of sorts, sub­ti­tled ​“Our Arca­dias” in ref­er­ence to the nos­tal­gic sanc­tu­ar­ies of the past which only exist through ran­dom dreams and mem­o­ries, but are often drawn out through the deep con­sid­er­a­tion of psy­chi­cal arte­facts. These can include poet­ry books, ear­ly Amer­i­can rap music, ugly mus­cle cars, aca­d­e­m­ic text­books or, most per­ti­nent to this film, col­lect­ed love let­ters from a time before mass elec­tron­ic communication.

The sto­ry is split into three the­mat­i­cal­ly inter­sect­ing chap­ters enti­tled ​“Child­hood”, ​“Rus­sia” and ​“Esther”. The first is a short and sim­ple rec­ol­lec­tion of boy­hood as intoned to a semi-clad bed­side com­pan­ion, offer­ing lit­tle more than con­tex­tu­al bal­last for the ensu­ing two chap­ters. Paul’s fam­i­ly trau­mas are laid out, per­haps explain­ing his ambiva­lence to immerse him­self in rela­tion­ships lat­er in life. That’s unfair – he’s more a crea­ture of love’s instant phys­i­cal grat­i­fi­ca­tions than he is of spend­ing time and effort to nur­ture those plea­sures. His dis­tant father sel­dom appears in the film and has lit­tle inter­est in his son’s activ­i­ties (noc­tur­nal or oth­er­wise). Nev­er­the­less, Paul is locked into a path of pas­sive Oedi­pal redress, he’s an ultra-charm­ing refusenik who cher­ish­es inde­pen­dence as a way to get the most from life.

“Rus­sia” is an eccen­tric anec­dote which is sparked by Paul being col­lared by French cus­toms due to an anom­aly in his trav­el records and the fact that he appears to have an exact dou­ble liv­ing in Mel­bourne. An agent played by Andre Dus­soli­er assists him in remem­ber­ing why this could be the case, even­tu­al­ly ush­er­ing Paul back to rare moment of youth­ful polit­i­cal inquis­i­tive­ness when he agreed to smug­gle a par­cel of agit­prop pam­phlets into pre-Glas­nost Min­sk as well as allow­ing his pass­port to be ​“stolen” to help a com­rade leave the coun­try. Dedalus recounts the tale with fond enthu­si­asm, know­ing full well that his reck­less aban­don as a teenag­er could hard­ly be held up against him now.

This episode is spun out like a minia­ture spy thriller which – like so much in this won­der­ful film – con­cludes on a note of bit­ter­sweet res­ig­na­tion. It’s not entire­ly down to the real­i­sa­tion that so much time as passed since the events being dis­sect­ed, but that this unfin­ished episode has final­ly found a nat­ur­al human clo­sure. At one point in the third chap­ter, Paul weeps as the Berlin Wall falls on TV. His friends remind him that it’s a joy­ous occa­sion, but he sees it as lit­tle more as a mark­er of his impend­ing and depress­ing shift into adulthood.

The final and largest part of the film charts the tumul­tuous, provin­cial love affair between young, up-for-any­thing Paul (Quentin Dol­maire) and the lis­som local man-eater Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet), who is two years his junior. From the nascent pangs of sex­u­al yearn­ing through to a melan­cholic long dis­tance rela­tion­ship when Paul opts to study for a PHD in Paris, Desplechin presents the cou­ple in a state of con­stant sen­ti­men­tal flux, but whose base urges remain con­stant enough that even the most fraught of cir­cum­stances (bed-hop­ping being top of the pile) can even­tu­al­ly be overcome.

Per­haps fore­most among the vast cat­a­logue of Desplechin’s achieve­ments here is his fond recre­ation of ​’80s France, a place where the dis­con­nect between gen­er­a­tions has become more pro­nounced and the preva­lence of edu­ca­tion is pro­duc­ing hoards of Yeats-quot­ing dandies-in-the-mak­ing who have their eyes con­stant­ly trained on the hori­zon. Using the occa­sion­al iris shot to empha­sise the fact that the act of remem­ber­ing is inher­ent­ly cin­e­mat­ic, the sun-crisped, agile cin­e­matog­ra­phy of Iri­na Lubtchan­sky places us in the past but always mak­ing sure we’re fac­ing towards the future. The musi­cal cues, too, are the stuff of drunk­en dreams, whether the left-field album cuts which sound­track the laid-back lives of these char­ac­ters, or the pre­cise­ly placed clas­si­cal selec­tions dropped at key emo­tion­al junc­tures. One in par­tic­u­lar when Esther arrives at Paul’s house par­ty in slow motion, is a dou­ble-shot of pure cin­e­mat­ic sensuality.

This is a tremen­dous film from Desplechin, all the more so due to the fact that he nev­er once looks like he’s try­ing, or forc­ing, or declaim­ing, or con­triv­ing, or rein­vent­ing. Mem­o­ry is pre­sent­ed as a form of nat­ur­al mag­ic, and the ques­tion of reli­a­bil­i­ty is moot because the char­ac­ter of Paul has been sculpt­ed as to be cold­ly ratio­nal and free of self-con­scious­ness, yet total­ly trust­wor­thy. Let’s wait and see, but this could very well emerge as the director’s mas­ter­piece, so con­sum­mate is its dewy-eyed vision of love as our prime con­duit into the past. It’s a film which could hap­pi­ly spi­ral on into infin­i­ty, and you kin­da wish it would…