My Golden Days

Mathieu Amalric reprises the role of Paul Dédalus from Arnaud Desplechin’s My Sex Life…Or How I Got into an Argument in MY GOLDEN DAYS, the character’s origin story.

Paul, now an anthropologist, prepares to leave Tajikistan and reflects on his life. He has a series of flashbacks that unfold in three episodes (newcomer Quentin Dolmaire portrays Paul as an adolescent).

The first includes his childhood in Roubaix, then he remembers his trip to the USSR, where a clandestine mission led him to offer up his own identity to a young Russian, whom he considers a phantom twin for the remainder of his life.

He remembers himself at nineteen in Roubaix, his sister Delphine, his cousin Bob, the parties with Pénélope, Mehdi and Kovalki, the friend who was to betray him. He remembers University life in Paris most of all, he remembers Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet), a beautiful, rude, haughty soul and the love of his life.

Quinzaine des réalisateurs, Cannes 2015

London Film Festival 2015

Week Commencing 16th March 2018

Week Commencing 30th March 2018

Arnaud Desplechin was born in 1960 in Roubaix. In 1984 he graduated in cinematography from IDHEC in Paris.

He was discovered in 1991 with his medium-length film La Vie des morts. His first feature, The Sentinel, was chosen for the official competition at Cannes in 1997. His next film, My Sex Life (How I Got Into an Argument) revealed a whole new generation of young actors – notably Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos. In fact, it’s his rapport with actors that add an extra dimension to Desplechin’s films, with his actors regularly receiving top awards for their work in his movies: two Césars for Best Male Newcomer (Emmanuel Salinger in The Sentinel and Mathieu Amalric in My Sex Life …), César for Best Actor (Mathieu Amalric in Kings and Queen), César for Best Supporting Actor (Jean-Paul Roussillon in A Christmas Tale), and the Cannes Film Festival 61st Anniversary Prize for Catherine Deneuve in A Christmas Tale. Six of Arnaud Desplechin’s films have been in official competition at Cannes.

My Golden Day was presented in Cannes' Quinzaine des réalisateurs in 2015.

Filmography

'My Golden Days feels highly distinctive…The film elegiacally depicts the late 1980s as a period of change and endings, and takes that decade as a frame for the lamenting of lost youth and lost love that has been a French literary trope at least since Flaubert and Proust…The young cast are superbly directed and very affecting…My Golden Days helps to pinpoint just what makes (Desplechin’s) best work so touching.'

Jonathan Romney, Sight & Sound

'My Golden Days is beautiful in its thoughtful complexity: a richly woven texture of emotion, affection, human foibles, anxieties, contradictions and passions.'

Catherine Sedgwick, The Upcoming

★★★★

'A mesmerisung tale of heartbreak...The film is an undeniable pleasure, with a wicked sense of humour and real heart.'

Owen Richards, The Arts Desk

'Arnaud Desplechin is such a distinctive storyteller: intriguing, perplexing, seductively indirect…It is about the unbearably sweet and unchangeable nature of remembered youth, speckled with literary references to Yeats, Proust and Homer…Desplechin’s film-making language is always fluent and rich.'

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

★★★★

'My Golden Days is very much a tale of how everyone is the sum of their experiences. The thrilling memory of an overwhelming passion, the sting of betrayal, the joy of being young and alive in a world full of possibilities have all left their mark on a Paul who is now older, wiser and more rueful than we have seen him before. Desplechin allows the search for lost times to unfold with a light touch, a vivid sense of Paris in the 1980s and 1990s, and a cast who bring freshness and vitality to the most familiar ingredients of a first great love.'

Allan Hunter,The List

'Terrific'

'This transcendent film..'

Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

'This bold, brilliant movie from Arnaud Desplechin... brims over with humour, heartbreak and ravishing romance...He crafts My Golden Days as if he'd never made a movie before, as if youthful emotions were spilling all over it. The result is an exhilarating gift.'

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

'Arnaud Desplechin's Cannes sensation contains an intoxicatingly realistic portrayal of the intense emotionality, the intertwined joy and pain, of first love...These young actors, guided by the veteran Desplechin, are so effective in their roles that we feel we are watching them live out a lifetime's worth of emotions right in front of our eyes. Film has always been especially effective it portraying what it can feel like, what it can mean to be in love, and "My Golden Days" is right up there with the best of them.'

‘Arnaud Desplechin and Mathieu Amalric revisit the adventures of Paul Dédalus in this marvelously vivid coming-of-age drama. Young leads Quentin Dolmaire and Lou Roy-Lecollinet (both maAnnking a superb screen debut)… ushered along by some of the most fluid, emotionally resonant filmmaking of Desplechin’s career.'

Justin Chang, Variety

'French Master Arnaud Desplechin's My Golden Days is a shimmering coming-of-age-tale...'

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