Arnaud Desplechin returned to Cannes Film Festival alongside his frequent collaborator Mathieu Amalric last year. Revisiting his character of Paul Dédalus, from 1996’s My Sex Life… or How I Got into an Argument, My Golden Days looks back at three periods in childhood and adolescence that shaped his life. One of the most well-received titles at Cannes, we caught up with it at NYFF, and named it one of the must-see films of 2016. Ahead of a March release thanks to Magnolia, the excellent first trailer has now arrived.
We said in our review, “Arnaud Desplechin’s My Golden Days bears some superficial similarities to national compatriots Eric Rohmer and Olivier Assayas, two directors who tend to make films about beautiful, young, artistic people going through tough times that results from some combination of inner conflict, government, and the sensibilities of other, equally fashionable people. Of course, these directors aren’t especially alike; Rohmer is concerned with the way a person’s desires and actions — or their ideas and realities — may conflict, particularly in concerns of (heterosexual) love; Assayas’ characters drift apart and float together through means largely outside their control, or at least through means incident rather than integral to their decisions. (His protagonists are generally undone by loneliness and isolation, whereas Rohmer’s encounter trouble when they interact with one another.) My Golden Days contains much of Rohmer’s hapless romance and Assayas’ internal depression, but it is temporally expansive and deploys new tricks at every turn in a way that the films of Assayas and especially Rohmer — whose work takes place in subtly but rigorously established worlds — never would.”
Starring Quentin Dolmaire, Lou Roy-Lecollinet, and Mathieu Amalric, check out the trailer and poster below.
MY GOLDEN DAYS is the story of Paul Dédalus, an anthropologist preparing to leave Tajikistan (played in his middle age by Matheiu Amalric). Reflecting on his life, he has a series of flashbacks starting from his childhood in Roubaix, his mother’s attacks of madness, his father’s alienating depression. He remembers a student trip to the USSR, where a clandestine mission led him to offer up his own identity for a young Russian, whom he considered a phantom twin for the remainder of his life. He remembers university life, and returning to his hometown to party with his sister and her best friend, his shifting circle of friends and their casual betrayals. And most of all he remembers Esther, the beautiful, rude, haughty soul and love of his life.
My Golden Days opens on March 18th, 2016.