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).
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