Les Temps qui changent (2004)

Les Temps qui changent is a French romantic film drama first released in 2004, directed by André Téchiné.  The film stars Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu, Gilbert Melki , Malik Zidi and Lubna Azabal.  It has also been released under the title: Changing Times.  Our overall rating for this film is: mediocre.


Engineer Antoine arrives in Tangier to oversee the construction of a state-of-the-art media centre.  His real motive for being there is to make contact with Cécile, his first true love, whom he hasn’t seen for 30 years.  When they meet, he discovers that she is married, to Nathan, a Moroccan doctor, and has a son, Sami.  The latter has just flown in from Paris with his girlfriend Nadia and her young son, although he is more preoccupied with looking up his former boyfriend, Bilal.  In spite of Cécile’s insistence that their affair is long dead and buried, Antoine is determined to win her back and spend the rest of his life with her…

French film icons Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu are reunited for their sixth on-screen romantic liaison in this moody drama from director André Téchiné.  The film explores the darker aspects of love – the painful recollection of a past infatuation, the lingering anxieties that are left in its wake, the impossibility of rekindling a dead relationship – and is a striking contrast with some of Téchiné’s earlier, more conventional love films.

Les Temps qui changent offers some great performances, as you would expect from a film by a great director.  It’s a joy seeing Deneuve and Depardieu spar off each other again, and it’s hard not to believe they weren’t lovers at some time in the distant past, so tangible is their on-screen rapport.  Both actors bring a sense of truth and realism to their portrayals, something which has perhaps been lacking in the past few years.   There are also some respectable contributions from the supporting cast, notably Gilbert Melki and Malik Zidi, in spite of the fact that their parts are under-written and somewhat lacking in credibility.

Where the film is least successful is its presentation.  The film is shot entirely on digital video, with a shaky hand-held camera, and crudely edited in the manner of an amateur video.  The result is far and away André Téchiné’s ugliest, least accessible film.  There is the distinct impression that Téchiné is attempting to appropriate another (younger) director’s style without having any real feel for the approach he is using.  Some of the sequences in the film are so badly shot and assembled that you do feel as if the whole thing is a wilful exercise in style over substance.

Not only is the narrative flow of the film compromised by this awkward “faux primitif” style, but the contributions of the actors are pretty well undermined, to the extent that a lot of the emotion they are struggling to convey is lost.  With a more restrained visual style the film would probably have had less character, but it would have been an easier ride for the spectator and would probably have had much greater emotional impact.  As it is, Les Temps qui changent feels like a clumsy and far from successful experimentation with cinematic form, painful to watch and barely recognisable as the work of one of French cinema’s most respected film directors.

© James Travers 2007

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