Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse (2015)
Directed by Arnaud Desplechin

Film Review

In his latest film, critically acclaimed director Arnaud Desplechin takes a Proustian trip down memory lane as he weaves a compassionate prequel to his 1996 film Comment je me suis disputé... (ma vie sexuelle).  Now well into middle-age and successful in his chosen career, Desplechin's alter ego Paul Dédalus (named after the central character in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) is seen suffering from a crisis of identity.  This, helped by a nasty brush with French officialdom (a less tasty madeleine than the one that figures in Proust's seven volume novel but just as effective), brings on a sudden bout of soul searching in which Dédalus relives past experiences so that he can make sense of his life and work out who exactly he is.

Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse has all the qualities that have earned Desplechin his high standing (as rigorous in its writing and acting as on the technical front), but there is also a more pronounced human dimension, a warmth and tenderness that have so far been fairly lacking from much of his work.  His most engaging film to date, this beautifully composed nostalgia trip matches the maturity of its mise-en-scène and script with a genuinely heartfelt account of first love and is sure to reaffirm Desplechin's reputation as one of France's most gifted auteur filmmakers.

In the film's more sombre framing sequences, Desplechin regular Mathieu Amalric reprises the role that helped to set him on the road to stardom in the mid-1990s, whilst his younger self is played by exciting newcomer Quentin Dolmaire in what is assuredly another star-making role.  Dolmaire has to age from 16 to 21 in the course of the film, and does so remarkably convincingly, looking eerily like a younger Amalric as he does so.  The actor's intoxicating charm, coupled with his obvious ability, makes him the focus of Desplechin's sprawling film and is someone we can readily identify with, bringing humour, depth and a subtle poignancy to his character's painful sentimental education across five traumatic years.  Desplechin is just as fortunate in the actress he chose to play the younger version of Emmanuelle Devos (Amalric's lover in Comment je me suis disputé) - Lou Roy-Lecollinet, who is every bit as true-to-life, enchanting and sensual as Devos (even matching her indefinable mystique) in her first screen role.

As its title suggests, Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse comprises three episodes in the formative years of its central character (whom we can safely assume is Desplechin himself).  Spanning a fair chunk of the 1980s and 1990s, the flashback narrative ranges from Roubaix to Minsk (not long before the fall of Communism) to Paris and shows Paul Dédalus gradually acquiring an adult identity through a mix of escapades that range from the all-too-familiar to the downright improbable.  After a brief foray into childhood that plays like a Grimm's fairytale, the film takes us by surprise by becoming a parody of a Cold War thriller in which our hero has a stab at being a secret agent behind the Iron Curtain and ends up giving up his identity to a complete stranger.  The handing over his passport is a crucial moment in the film, symbolising Paul's loss of identity which continues to haunt him throughout his adult life and ultimately prompts the remembrance of things past à la Proust.

The bulk of the film is concerned with the third recollection depicting Paul's nascent love affair with Esther, who is not just his first love but also the woman who apparently had the greatest impact on his life.  Paul and Esther's budding relationship - made dazzlingly vivid by the raw authenticity of Dolmaire and Roy-Lecollinet's performances - is hampered by separations imposed on them by the brutal realities that accompany their process of maturation.  They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, well Desplechin proves this old adage by reminding us how the heartache of young love was once pleasantly aggravated  by enforced separation in those halcyon days before mobile phones and the internet came along and cruelly rendered the hand-written love letter, so essential to a fledgling romance, completely obsolete.  Today's digitally minded, endlessly texting Romeos and Juliets don't know what they're missing.  Hashtag whatever.

Eschewing the more formalised, clinically intellectual approach of his previous films for a warmer, sunnier, more sentimental style of cinematic expression, Desplechin crafts a coming-of-age drama that is both deeply personal and intensely engaging.  His is an unashamedly rose-tinted view of adolescence in which he himself indulges in playful nostalgia by borrowing Francois Truffaut's use of the iris effect and having actors talking to camera in a way that is so quaintly Nouvelle Vague.  Somewhere between À la recherche du temps perdu and Baisers volés, Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse is a haunting evocation of youth and the dreams of youth that brims with a kind of sweet but piercing romanticism that is virtually non-existent in cinema these days.  Through his central character's search for his lost identity Desplechin appears to be mourning the decline of cinema towards a soulless form of entertainment that is lacking not only in identity but also a capacity to feel and make us feel.  When the present no longer moves us and the future leaves us cold, where else can we go but the past?

Film Synopsis

On his return to France after spending several years in Tajikistan, forty-something anthropologist Paul Dédalus is prompted to looks back on his past.  He recalls his childhood in Roubaix, his mother's fits of madness, the brother Ivan he was once so close to and the father who became an inconsolable widower.  He remembers undertaking the long journey to the Soviet Union, where a secret mission led him to give up his passport to a young Russian man so that he could escape to the West.  It was whilst studying in Paris that Paul met Dr Behanzin and acquired his lifelong fascination for the science of anthropology.  And then there was Esther, the girl who stole his heart and became central to his existence...