[yasr_overall_rating]
Paul is preparing to leave Tajikistan, while thinking back on his adolescent years. His childhood, his mother’s madness, the parties, the trip to the USSR where he lost his virginity, the friend who betrayed him and the love of his life.
From “Stand By Me” to “Boyhood,” coming-of-age stories tend to strike a resonant note with viewers, due to the genre’s fundamental relatability. We all throw the occasional retrospective glance back at our pasts, the hazy memories of childhood, the defining moments of our lives that shape us: our parents, getting into trouble for the first time, falling in love… But it also comes down to simple images that stir up profound emotions – something as insignificant as a vase, a gust of wind, a whiff of an aroma, a fleeting glance.
Just like the process of cells in our bodies constantly dying and being replaced (one could argue we are in a perpetual state of reincarnation), French director Arnaud Desplechin’s examination of growing up, “My Golden Days,” keeps reinventing itself – visually and tonally. While it has its share of moments bordering on profound, it’s oddly uninvolving and disjointed. The experience of watching “My Golden Days” is like leafing through a stranger’s random photo album, where several pictures may make you pause, but ultimately you’re left feeling cold, rather than basking in the warm glow of bygone days.
Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric) bids goodbye to his girlfriend and leaves Tajikistan to go back to Paris. Suspicious custom authorities stop him at the border, and proceed to question him about his passport. This leads to Paul reminiscing about his childhood, starting from the early days, where a young Paul (Antoine Bui) fends off his insane mother with a bat, to early adolescence, where a grown-up Paul (Quentin Dolmaire) helps a Jewish couple escape the terrible woes of Russia back into the heavenly gates of Israel by – you guessed it – giving his passport to his look-alike (who looks nothing like him – therein lies the irony?). The narrative then switches, with an older Paul falling in love with the enigmatic (and frankly, quite slutty) Esther, who literally sleeps with all of his friends.
I expected the first, brutal “sadistic, crazy mother” bit to instinctively lead to some explanation of the passport being lost (after all, he is telling the story to a customs officer), but no – it’s just there, briefly, and while his mother’s ghosts haunt him throughout the film, that visceral scene is never really referred to again. When it does come to the passport scene, it’s fun, and has a lot of potential (like, say, delving into the meaning of “identity,” and two lives being branched off by that single event), but no – it sort of just fizzles away.
The way the film segues from his account to the customs officer to a third-person recollection is jarringly off-putting. The first 15% of the film is anecdotal and engaging, while the latter 85% is dedicated to a love story that fluctuates between moments of true poignancy and pretentious artistic flourishes. “My Golden Days” goes from a horror-like family drama (which happens to be the best part of the film, and also the briefest), to a political thriller, to an almost-heist movie, to a love story. All this is supplemented by Ingrid Bergman-esque filmmaking, mixed with highly-stylized split-screens, images shown in silhouettes, characters waxing poetic directly into the camera, dead Grandmas (yeah, it’s there) – and let’s not forget the “Fight Club”-like sequence of self-mutilation, which made me cringe uncomfortably, primarily because I still don’t get why that specific character would go through all the trouble. Those swings from naturalism to eccentricity, from heartfelt dialogue to pseudo-poetic nonsense, are, I assume, meant to portray the ups-and-downs of life, but come off as gratingly uneven when condensed into two hours.
Paul-the-teenager is a broke, chain-smoking, “idiot savant” hipster (a-la Llewyn Davis), well-versed in art, history and religion, especially those of Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, and Israel. He is overly sensitive – at one point, he event faints at some (admittedly tragic) news. And yet, we never know his motivations, what truly drives him. Why is he so hell-bent on helping his friend? Why is he so invested in Eastern-European and Middle-Eastern politics? Why is he so nonchalant about his girlfriend’s – the love of his life, mind you – promiscuity? The blame doesn’t fall on Dolmaire, who actually makes a rather compelling feature acting debut – it’s like Desplechin expects us to already know Paul, and therefore relate to his experiences.
There are moments of memorable dialogue, especially in the earlier scenes of Paul and Esther getting to know each other, which feel natural and sexy (“Men come”, Esther states after a particularly passionate act of coitus, “but women go off.”) Love lasts, as does bitterness, vocalized succinctly by Paul: “A love intact. My fury intact.” Sadly, the script later becomes increasingly pompous, repetitive and inexplicable. “Take me,” Esther says at one melodramatic “sexy” point. Another eye-rolling moment, and I paraphrase, comes when Paul utters: “Have you ever been loved more than life? This is how I’ll love you.”
That’s not to say I don’t recommend watching the film. Sometimes an ambitious failure is worth a million run-of-the-mill Marvel films. There is a lot here to like. Though Amalric, a great actor, has little to do in a thankless role, the rest of the primarily young cast carry the film admirably. There are passages of true visual poetry and humor (a clothing mishap being a standout). I like the notion of someone being “undone” by love, the concept of losing the alluring, mysterious veneer – both inaccessibility and vulnerability can be equally sexy and sad. Desplechin’s commitment to the material is evident – he clearly feels for his characters, and probably went through a lot of it himself.
The problem is – he rarely gets us to feel the same. There’s too little at stake, and the disjointed narrative doesn’t help the lack of a drive, a forward momentum. Perhaps if it were more pensive and elegiac – or straight-up purely “artsy”, a succession of heartrending images and sounds – then there wouldn’t even be a need for that momentum. But the fact that it’s neither here nor there is maddening, and the great moments just emphasize the poor creative choices. Perhaps next time the director throws that retrospective glance back at his golden days, he can select ones that shine brighter.
In theaters March 18th
