Screened as part of NZIFF 2015

My Golden Days 2015

Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse

Directed by Arnaud Desplechin

An engagingly eccentric and engrossingly literate coming-of-age film from French writer-director Arnaud Desplechin (My Sex Life), featuring Mathieu Amalric and a cast of brilliant young newcomers.

France In French with English subtitles
120 minutes CinemaScope / DCP

Screenplay

Arnaud Desplechin
,
Julie Peyr

Photography

Irina Lubtchansky

Editor

Laurence Briaud

Production designer

Toma Baqueni

Costume designer

Nathalie Raoul

Music

Grégoire Hetzel

With

Quentin Dolmaire (Paul Dédalus)
,
Lou Roy-Lecollinet (Esther)
,
Mathieu Amalric (adult Paul)
,
Dinara Droukarova (Irina)
,
Cécile Garcia Fogel (Jeanne Dédalus, mother)
,
Françoise Lebrun (Rose)
,
Irina Vavilova (Madame Sidorov)
,
Olivier Rabourdin (Abel Dédalus, father)

Festivals

Cannes (Directors’ Fortnight) 2015

French writer-director Arnaud Desplechin delighted Cannes audiences with this new classic – a fresh, richly individual memoir of youthful adventure, friendships, and formative first love. Devotees of Desplechin’s My Sex Life will recognise this film’s central couple, seen here in the earliest phases of their relationship, but no acquaintance with the earlier movie is required to get totally caught up in this one.

“The French title translates to ‘three memories of my youth’. The first two chapters are short, dispensing with the boy Paul’s childhood and recounting a too-odd-not-to-be-true late-80s high-school smuggling mission to Minsk. The third chapter, which constitutes the bulk of the movie, focuses on Paul (Quentin Dolmaire) as a student and his courtship of Esther (luminous newcomer Lou Roy-Lecollinet). A magnet for every teen guy in town, Esther is nonetheless drawn to Paul’s idiosyncratic style. (No one else has tried to win her attention by teaching her how to play the board game Go.) Their burgeoning relationship, its separations bridged by letters, will haunt him for decades.” — Ben Kenigsberg, RogerEbert.com

“This is a rich and literary film, full of warmth and life and sadness and humor, loving all its characters without necessarily showing them to be good people… Desplechin’s assembled a remarkable young cast, almost all of whom are newcomers. It feels like a new generation of talent emerging who’ll likely be cropping up in French cinema for decades to come… It’s written, shot, cut and performed with such palpable joy, intelligence and warmth that it ends up feeling entirely fresh.” — Oliver Lyttelton, The Playlist