My Golden Days

The anthropologist Paul Dédalus returns to France from Tajikistan after years away and is stopped at the airport: there is a problem with his passport, because as a boy he gave his identity to someone else. That detention is the film's frame, and the narration opens from it into three memories, the longest of them his relationship with Esther. The subject is not love but whose version remembering is. Paul tells everything from his own position and what Esther thinks arrives only in letters; the film never quite gives her a voice, and the omission is deliberate. The form is free and scattered. The jumps between years are not explained, letters are read to camera, and some passages turn into a spy story. Arnaud Desplechin has no hesitation about changing genre midway. The film is a prequel to one of his own from 1996: the same character, younger. What binds them is not only a name and a performer but the weight the story carries for a viewer who remembers that film. Quentin Dolmaire plays the young Paul and Lou Roy-Lecollinet plays Esther; both became known through it. Mathieu Amalric continues as the adult Paul. It screened in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes and won the directing prize at the Césars. Who it is for: viewers who like French coming-of-age narratives and untidy structure. Who it is not for: anyone who wants an orderly story; the film keeps changing the subject.