Imagine that you were offered to go into the past — to any era, time and day — and experience any event. What would you choose? Dinner with Hemingway? A heart-to-heart talk with a long-dead father that never took place? Or maybe the day you met the love of your life? Do not rush to answer, and when you decide, watch the wonderful film by Nicolas Bedos with Fanny Ardant, Daniel Auteuil and Guillaume Canet.
“There is one painful moment in a conversation with a woman. You bring facts, arguments, arguments. You appeal to logic and common sense. And suddenly you discover that the very sound of your voice is disgusting to her, ”Sergey Dovlatov described the state of crisis in a couple.
As always, very accurate. This is exactly what happened to Victor and Marianne Drumont.
Victor (Daniel Auteuil*) desperately resists change. He can be understood: the newspaper in which his illustrations were published was completely digitized, and the Internet does not need Victor’s comics. The artist is at war with the new world — the world of gadgets and technology — and is defeated time after time.
His wife Marinna (Fanny Ardant) also fights, but with age and with negative emotions — hers and her husband’s. And, it seems, she wins: she has a lover, and there are almost no wrinkles on her face, or, in any case, much less than women of her age. True, as soon as the lover passes into the status of a permanent partner, it turns out that at night he snores and, in general, is much less interesting than five minutes before the ex-husband.
But Marianna is just friends with technology: she managed to transfer her psychotherapeutic practice to an online format and, thanks to a special algorithm, serve 3000 patients a day.
How easy it is sometimes to play in the past, scrolling in your head the most pleasant moments of it
Here the reader would have to decide that Belle Epoque is another drama about the crisis of family life or about the clash of the old and the new, but no. To cheer up the completely depressed father, the son gives him an unusual experience — the opportunity to be transported to any era and become anyone in it. Victor chooses 1974, more precisely — May 16, 1974 in Lyon. The day he met the girl who changed his life.
And here, it seems, it is time to complete the text, so as not to kill all the intrigue and not tell how exactly this time travel will happen. But Belle Epoque is the very case when everything is perfect in the film: the plot, the dialogues, the music, the actors, and the meaning.
It is how easy it is sometimes to play in the past, scrolling in your head and not only its most pleasant moments. The fact that nostalgia can play a cruel joke on us and how dangerous it is to “dig through scraps of memories”, “constantly rewrite people at will”. The fact that it is much more important to look at the person next to you — and “find beauty in him, sadness, be surprised by him. Today, here and now.»
Otherwise, life will remain a draft, it «will contain only preludes, etudes and interesting sketches, but there will be no life itself.»
3 more movies if you like Belle Epoque:
· «Meeting point» (The Place, 2017) — a feature-length adaptation of the series «The Table in the Corner», a story about a mysterious stranger who is ready to fulfill any desire of the interlocutor. True, in return, demanding a strange and not always humane fee.
· «Perfect family» (Una famiglia perfetta, 2012, not to be confused with the 2011 American comedy of the same name) is another film whose intrigue is not worth revealing, and ideally reading the description too. The film was written and directed by Paolo Genovese, who directed The Meeting Place.
· «Midnight in Paris» (Midnight in Paris, 2011) — in the film, just like in Belle Epoque, the theme of traveling into the past is played out, only the hero of Owen Wilson, a Hollywood screenwriter, flies to Paris with his bride and due to mystical circumstances (something , and Woody Allen knows how to invent this) is transferred to the 1920s and finds himself in the company of Hemingway, Picasso, Dali, Fitzgerald and his other idols.
* Daniel Auteuil may be known to the older generation for the duology «Jerks», as well as the films «Manon from the source» and «The French Woman».