Belle Epoque, La

Synopsis: When Victor (Daniel Auteuil), a disillusioned sixty-year-old Parisian, is turned out of his apartment by his wife (Fanny Ardant) he decides to re-live the best year of his life courtesy of a company that specializes in interactive historical reconstructions.

The target audience for La Belle Époque is quite specific – senior citizens whose heyday was the late 1960s and early ‘70s. With two icons of modern French film in the lead, an attention-demanding script and a skillfully-realized production design, today’s super-annuants are afforded the pleasure of travelling back to the 1970s and reflecting on the passage of time in their own lives.

Deriving much of its success from the refreshingly original screenplay by Virginie Le Pionnier and Rémi Daru, one which no doubt Charlie Kaufman would admire, La Belle Époque addresses issues of identity, memory, love and loneliness, loss and regret (amongst many other things, you can take your pick) in a headily playful mix, both guardedly nostalgic and cleverly up-to-the-minute, that intrigues and amuses in equal measure, qualities we haven't seen in mainstream French cinema for a long time. 

Much like David Fincher's The Game (1997) to which it bears a family resemblance the intricate plot doesn’t always stand scrutiny from a credibility point of view and some may question the reassuringly hopeful resolution paralleled by the film’s narrative transition from the confrontational to the conventional, but this is no big deal in what is essentially a date movie for the baby boomer generation. One of the things that makes La Belle Époque so entertaining is that we the audience are given an unusually rare opportunity to, in imagination at least, bend the story towards our own experience. No one on screen seems completely sure about where things are going. who’s playing a part or who’s for real.

In the lead roles stage and screen veterans Auteuil and Ardant, both just the other side of seventy are perhaps a tad too old to make the time frame fit perfectly but on the other hand as Victor and Marianne , he, resigned to his insignificance, she all caustic scorn for his defeatism, they are well-cast. The dinner party at which we first encounter them together with its aftermath when Victor gets the heave-ho from his spouse is a classic of marital squabbling French style.

Director Nicolas Bedos, assisted by his savvy production team, bring off the multi-layered screenplay with flair whilst the support cast and in particular Doria Tillier as the actress playing the young Marianne are all very effective in helping us to suspend our disbelief.

Particularly if you don’t speak French you’ll have your work cut out following the zesty sub-titled dialogue but this is a film that makes the effort worthwhile.

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