You have your average coming of age film, and then you have French director Arnaud Desplechin’s sublime coming of age story My Golden Days. It serves as a prequel of sorts to the writer-director’s 1996 effort, My Sex Life, or … How I Got Into an Argument. Mathieu Amalric returns to play Paul Dédalus, who is currently being interrogated by airport security at Paris after returning after years away in Tadjikstan. He’s being held because security has found chargers of possible espionage, and he’s forced to dive deep into his past to start from the beginning in order to bring some clarity to the situation.
In flashbacks we’re introduced to teenage Paul (played by Quentin Dolmaire), and see his time spent as a youth is Russia, helping out Russian Jews by sneaking them passports and cash. These scenes are entertaining, but the heart and soul of Desplechin’s love-strong tale is the budding relationship between Paul and the girl of his dreams Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet), who will undoubtedly call to mind plenty of girls that got away to many of us hopeless romantics, just like Paul. He’s busy traveling and diving into the world of education and anthropology and their timing is never quite right. They dive into other relationships, most of them purely sexual, even if they say otherwise, their affections are clearly still locked on one another. The cliche will they won’t they narrative is so familiar, yet still so engaging in the manner that Desplechin handles it all, and because Dolmaire and Roy-Lecollinet have some major league chemistry to play with.
Paul brings us through various encounters of his young life, and the connective thread is his relationship with Esther, even with all of their confusing up and downs and constant uncertainty. Although she plays the part of confident, sexual young-woman, she also shows signs of weaknesses, such as always being needed. When Paul is unable to be there for her due to his academic commitments elsewhere, she turns to Paul’s cousin Bob (Theo Fernandez) and another friend, Jean-Pierre (Pierre Andrau). Seeing these acts of betrayal stings on the screen, and particularly hit a nerve for me for both personal reasons, and because you can’t help but have an inherent rooting interest in seeing Paul and Esther’s relationship work out.
The tenderness and heartache that feels painfully familiar and real is a part of Desplechin’s charm, and it’s in pristine form throughout. Towards the end of the film we return to the weathered version of Amalric’s Paul and although he’s been removed from Esther for some time now, a chance encounter with someone when he returns home reminds him of just how important she was and will always be to him, even if she’s no longer a part of his present. It’s a powerful idea, and one that we can all certainly relate to in some universal fashion.
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