Avis des critiques

It made a very strong impression on me when I first saw it at AFI Fest late last year. I recall that it evoked the high of first love without resorting to screenwriting clichés or trite visuals, that it riffed on the tangled nature of memory and formally reflected that concern in its editing in ways that brought to mind Alain Resnais, and that in its totality it imparted a real sense of the mass and heft of lived experience.

Not entirely impeccable, but as sharp and moving a portrait of the irrational splendors of young love as I've seen in a long time.

Desplechin makes a point of having Paul mention his double in the final scene, but the last-second effort at synthesis feels ad hoc—were the first and second sections removed, nobody unaware of the fact would sense their absence... A superlative First Big Romance picture to which unrelated reminiscences cling like barnacles.

Desplechin's provincial Paris neighborhoods breathe with the lived experience of misfit working-class French teenagers... But what holds MY GOLDEN DAYS together is the play between the film's grammar and Dédalus' relationship with Esther (played by an utterly enrapturing Lou Roy-Lecollinet)--a relationship that inspires one's own reflections on an individual who had such a profound impact on one's life that they've dilated the universe's time-memory fabric.

Arnaud Desplechin's "My Golden Days," which played at the New York Film Festival last fall and opened in regular run last Friday, is a terrible disappointment, the work of a filmmaker who's not pushing himself at all. I'm astonished by the acclaim it's receiving—and yet I'm not—because the movie's particular defects match perfectly with some of the cinematic dogmas of the art-house class.

Desplechin constructs [Paul and Esther's] relationship tenderly, acknowledging that, while a first love usually won't last, that doesn't mean it's unimportant. In Paul's case, his first innocent blush of candor was the defining moment of his life.

The film's concerns skew similarly to those of Jimmy P, particularly in the willful reduction of complex internal emotions in exchange for easy answers... Yet where that film was serious, portentous and ideologically murky, My Golden Days is so deftly and playfully constructed that it seems almost frivolous at first, a lightness that only makes its subtextual web of references, connections and reflections all the more rewarding in retrospect.

My Golden Days, set mostly in the 1980s, isn't an autobiographical film, but it has the shimmering intimacy of one.

It invites viewers to reflect on the past two decades of his career, during which he has brought to life a set of richly intricate and emotionally potent tales that evoke the singular pleasure of cinema, from My Sex Life andKings & Queen to A Christmas Tale and now My Golden Days... Quentin Dolmaire and Lou Roy-Lecollinet deliver stunning performances as the young lovers, whose relationship we observe develop and ultimately disintegrate.

Despite some striking uses of direct-to-camera address (a Desplechin staple), My Golden Days' undercurrents of regret remain just that, never breaking in a gush over the colorful surface of the film. Still, it's a treat to watch, covered in eccentric strokes and oddball details that seem too specific not to be extremely personal.

By the time Paul makes his move, Esther, alone and elevated, the camera whirling below her, looks like a statue on a pedestal. Mr. Desplechin stages and shoots this encounter beautifully, pulling back to show Paul walking across a suddenly emptied courtyard toward Esther. As Paul walks, the wind picks up, and fallen leaves begin eddying around his feet, their swirling movement echoing the fluid, sweeping camera and helping shift the movie from its more familiar realism into a lyrical register.

The bracing recollections of youthful political action; the fond memories of idle afternoons spent on carpets reading and listening to records; and the sweet evocations of first love as it grows from chit-chat on the grounds outside school to long strolls the morning after a house party: Desplechin views all of this with a touching, complex nostalgia. There is serious pain in this movie — pain that endures throughout the years — but also a sincere love for life lived, and life remembered.