Les Plus belles années d'une vie (2019)
Directed by Claude Lelouch

Film Review

53 years after Un homme et une femme (1966), his most celebrated and successful film, director Claude Lelouch brings together that film's lead actors, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée, for an affectionate reunion that allows him to be pay tribute to two icons of French cinema.  Lelouch has good reason to look back on his 1966 film.  Considered by many to be the highpoint of his incredibly productive career, this not only won the Palme d'or at the Festival de Cannes in 1966, it also received two Oscars, a feat seldom achieved by any French film.  Les Plus belles années d'une vie comes three decades after an earlier sequel, Un homme et une femme: Vingt ans déjà, released in 1986, and completes a trilogy that Lelouch's fans will no doubt cherish.

Claude Lelouch may be prolific but few would venture to call him subtle.  As you might expect, his reflection on Un homme et une femme is a characteristically flamboyant affair that is calculated to deliver the most forceful of nostalgia rushes.  As well as honouring his two favourite actors, Lelouch intends his film to be a full-on celebration of love and life and has the feel of a valedictory work, although, knowing Lelouch, he will probably go on to make another thirty or so films before he finally departs for the great film studio in the sky.

Les Plus belles années d'une vie interweaves poignant scenes of Trintignant and Aimée, now in their late eighties but still captivating, with excerpts from Lelouch's much-loved 1966 film and his 1976 short film C'était un rendez-vous. The film plays the nostalgia card for all it is worth, helped with music from his long-serving composer Francis Lai (including the famous chabadabada theme from Un homme et une femme).

In common with just about every film that Claude Lelouch has ever made, this latest offering is shamelessly overdone, but on this occasion we can readily forgive his self-indulgence.  Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée occupy such a pivotal place in the cinema experiences of so many people that an adoring homage of this kind is entirely justified, even if the film is totally lacking in narrative substance and relies too much on obvious emotionality to gain our approval.

Film Synopsis

It is more than half a century since Jean-Louis Duroc met the love of his life, Anne Gauthier, when they both dropped their children off at a boarding school in Deauville.  At the time Duroc was an internationally renowned racing driver, Anne a busy script-girl - both were struggling to get over the premature deaths of their partners.  Now in his late eighties, Duroc is in a retirement home stricken with Alzheimer's disease.  As contact with the world around him slowly slips from his grasp, Duroc loses himself in the maze of his memories.  One name impresses itself on him: Anne Gauthier.  Believing that a re-acquaintance with Anne will benefit his father's state of mind, Duroc's son Antoine sets out to find her and persuade her to visit him.  She too is now almost at the end of her life, but she remembers her passionate love affair with Duroc as if it were only yesterday...