Butler's Cinema Scene

Quentin Dolmaire, Lou Roy-Lecollinet

“MY GOLDEN DAYS”  My rating: B- (Opens April 15 at the Tivoli)

123 minutes | MPAA rating: R

First love can be tough. If we’re lucky we can look back on it with fondness, even while acknowledging how we screwed it up.  Sometimes things go south and it’s really nobody’s fault.

Arnaud Desplechin’s “My Golden Days” is a sequel to his 1996 breakthrough film “My Sex Life,” in which he gave us his big-screen alter ego, Paul Dedalus (Mathieu Amalric), a young intellectual  juggling several women.

The new film opens with Paul Dedalus (Amalric once again) returning to France after living most of his adult life in Russia.  Before he can get into the country, though, must have a sit-down with a government security man (Andre Dussollier) about why according to passport records he’s been living the last three decades in Israel.

This leads to the film’s first flashback, a bit of mini-espionage in which the teenage Paul (Quentin Dolmaire) used a high school field trip to the U.S.S.R. to smuggle documents to Jewish refuseniks.  He even gave his French passport to a young Jew his own age, and that man used it to relocate to Israel.  This segment plays like The Hardy Boys Do James Bond.

Once that business has been cleared up and the middle-aged Paul is free to reenter France, the second and more substantial of the film’s flashbacks kicks in.  In this one Paul is a college student who on a weekend break to visit his family falls for one of his younger sister’s friends, the pouty/sexy Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet).

Esther is 16 going on 40.  She’s got the world-weary air of someone who’s already lived it all and a history of much older boyfriends. Next to her the virginal Paul feels hopelessly provincial — not that he’s a virgin for much longer.

The emotional spine of “My Golden Days” rests on the role reversal the lovers experience over several years.  Paul, who’s studying anthropology under a terrific professor from Africa, is rapidly becoming a sophisticated intellectual.  Conversely Esther, whom Paul initially saw as way out of his league, is revealed to be basically a small-town girl, experienced sexually but a bit backwards in other regards.

Mathieu Amalric

They grow apart. It’s inevitable.

In France the Paul Dedelus saga is — thanks to the success of “My Sex Life” — a widely recognized coming of age tale. Fans of the first movie have been pumped to see this latest episode of the character’s saga.

Here in America, where “My Sex Life” was never a hit (I can find no record of it ever having played in Kansas City), the yarn lacks that built-in audience and enthusiasm.

The film stands on its own as a bittersweet tale of young love, but the whole U.S.S.R. subplot seems extraneous and characters and moments that resonate with fans of the first movie don’t mean that much to audiences who haven’t shared that earlier experience.

| Robert W.Butler