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Les Temps qui changent
2004 Drama / Romance
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Credits
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Director: André Téchiné
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Script: André Téchiné, Laurent Guyot, Pascal Bonitzer
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Photo: Julien Hirsch
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Music: Juliette Garrigues
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Cast: Catherine Deneuve (Cécile),
Gérard Depardieu (Antoine Lavau),
Gilbert Melki (Natan),
Malik Zidi (Sami),
Lubna Azabal (Nadia/Aïcha),
Tanya Lopert (Rachel Meyer),
Nabila Baraka (Nabila),
Idir Elomri (Saïd)
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Country: France
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Language: French
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Runtime: 90 min
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Aka: Changing Times
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Summary
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…
Review
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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