A coming of (middle) age drama that sees Paul (Mathieu Amalric) reflect on his teenage years as he returns home to Paris after almost a decade.

His focus lingers on his long distance romance with the lost love of his life – a typically French bouquet of sex, cigarettes and poetry. Love letters are read to camera through tear-stained eyes and rain-streaked windows, but their increasingly desperate earnestness rings hollow against the couple’s acts of infidelity and insensitivity.

Paul’s troubled childhood with a mentally ill mother and emotionally distant father is swept over swiftly, and while his brief detour to the USSR sparks the sense of teenage rebellion and political revolution that lingers over the film like cigarette smoke, these chapters could have been better integrated into the narrative; the film’s episodic structure is all but abandoned a third of the way in, hinting at a lack on conviction in the storytelling.

Nevertheless, the film is held together by strong lead performances from a baby-faced and brooding Quentin Dolmaire as a younger Paul, while Lou Roy-Lecollinet does her best with the somewhat cliché Esther, who descends on a tiresome trajectory from aloof seductress to emotional wreck.

My Golden Days appears to be a personal journey for writer/director Arnaud Desplechin, and there’s more than a whiff of masculine fantasy fulfilment about it, but Paul’s own mantra of ‘I felt nothing’ is oddly apt.

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My Golden Days (French title: Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse; also titled My Golden Years) is a 2015 French drama film directed by Arnaud Desplechin. It is a prequel to the 1996 film My Sex Life… or How I Got into an Argument. It was screened as part of the Directors’ Fortnight section of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival where it won the SACD Prize.

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