My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin, 2015)
My memories of New York hold light – the refraction of gold lamps in rain-slick glass doors, the flickering burn of taillights, the gentle halogen glow of the city as reflected by low-hanging clouds. I found the city easy to romanticize, and in memory even more so. Looking back, I can erase the sharp edges of my experience, the biting rain, the broken umbrellas, and dwell instead in images of light: reflected, refracted, or projected large onto the screen in Alice Tully Hall.
In My Golden Days, writer/director Arnaud Desplechin also remembers in light, constructing and reconstructing the memories of his characters to create compelling remembrances both wreathed in afterglow and defined by it. For Desplechin’s protagonist Paul Dedalus (played in adolescence by Quentin Dolmaire and in adulthood by Mathieu Amalric), the past is made melodramatic by years of remembering. In a triptych of increasingly stylized flashbacks, the film cinematically constructs Paul’s subjective remembrance of his past. Irises open the memories, first of Paul’s traumatic childhood and then of his teenage adventures in espionage. By the final recollection, which sees young Paul engaged in a turbulent romance with the compelling Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet), the film has entered high stylistic fantasy, employing voiceover narration, broken fourth walls, and at one point even a split-screen edit to build modern-day Paul’s time-intensified memory world.
Paradoxically, the film becomes more alienated from reality in order to make Paul’s memories more intuitively visceral; his longing to return to the intensely emotional world of his adolescence leads him to romanticize, to selectively forget the shadows cast by the sharp edges of his tumultuous relationship with Esther and to construct that era of his life as golden days. Like the Daedalus of myth, Paul Dedalus creates a labyrinth – this one built of memory and desire, into which we follow Desplechin’s camera.
What we find there seems inherently tied to cinematic convention. With a desultory, Truffaut-like approach to genre, Desplechin structures Paul’s memories around the stylistic and narrative conventions of the spy thriller, the melodrama, and the epistolary romance. At one point, a character invokes “the lessons of the western and the film noir,” explicitly calling on Western cinema and its reliable, meaning-laden structures as a foundation on which to understand life. Stylistically, the film suggests that Paul learns how to find meaning in his memories by treating them as pieces of Hollywood narrative cinema: discrete, contained objects complete with tidy themes and no loose ends.
It isn’t until the film moves out of memory and into the present that we realize the full ramifications of this character’s constructed nostalgia, the deep darkness that lurks around the edges of Paul’s spotlight of recollection. Esther, reduced in Paul’s memory to a two-dimensional token of what once was, now fuels his bitterness rather than his desire; his friendships crack and splinter under the weight of her flypaper image. We’re left disturbed by Paul’s golden days; but perhaps more importantly, we’re left wondering how much the film is disturbed by them. Desplechin, after all, is the orchestrator of his protagonist’s follies, and in their recollection, Paul’s constructed memories become complicated by the role of the camera in portraying them. After the screening at NYFF, when Desplechin took to the stage for a question-and-answer session, he portrayed his relationship to Paul Dedalus as something akin to Truffaut’s relationship to his own protagonist Antoine Doinel. For Desplechin, Paul is an autobiographical construction that’s made all the more candid by Desplechin’s cinematic romanticization of his life.
The self-professed autobiography of Desplechin’s fiction changes the implications of its most troubling moments, adding another extradiegetic turn to the labyrinth of remembrance and idealization crafted by the film. Suddenly, Paul’s objectification and flattening of Esther in his memory becomes corroborated by a force outside of his subjectivity, as mine has been in this review; our spectatorial focus shifts away from what we see on the screen and toward the complex film-filmmaker dynamic that lies behind it.
At its cinematically illuminated center, Arnaud Desplechin’s My Golden Days creates an engaging, ever-shifting portrait of the complicated relationship shared amongst the past, those who remember it, and those who portray it. But, surrounded as it is by twisting romanticization and autobiographical pitfalls, the film often sinks into the shadows of its cinematic contexts.
Author Biography
Christian Leus is a sophomore English-Film Studies major at Hendrix College and a native of Altheimer, Arkansas. An aspiring film critic, Christian spends her time writing about spectatorial experience and annoying her friends with her opinions.
Mentor Biography
Kristi McKim is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of Film Studies at Hendrix College, where she was awarded the Charles S. and Lucile Esmon Shivley Odyssey Professorship, honored as the 2014-15 United Methodist Exemplary Professor, and nominated for the CASE U.S. Professors of the Year Award. Her publications include the books Love in the Time of Cinema (2011) and Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change (2013), in addition to pieces in Camera Obscura, Studies in French Cinema, Senses of Cinema, Film International, The Cine-Files, and Film-Philosophy.
Department Overview
Hendrix College offers a major in English with an emphasis in Film Studies and a minor in Film Studies. This growing program within an intimate and rigorous liberal arts college environment includes a variety of courses in the history and theory of film and media, alongside co-curricular experiences (such as this trip to the New York Film Festival) generously made possible through the Hendrix-Odyssey Program. Extracurricular film-related groups include Hendrix Film Society and Hendrix Filmmakers.
Film Details
My Golden Days (2015)
France
Director Arnaud Desplechin
Runtime 123 minutes
Follow this link to read the introduction to this set of reviews: https://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/2016/05/21/2015-new-york-film-festival-introduction/
