Winner of the top prize in the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, Arnaud Desplechin’s My Golden Days finds Mathieu Amalric reprising his role as Paul Dédalus, a character he first played 20 years ago in Desplechin’s popular My Sex Life…Or How I Got into an Argument. In this prequel of sorts, we find Paul, now an anthropologist, reflecting on his life as he prepares to leave Tajikistan after a long stint there. Paul’s flashbacks unfold in three episodes with the superb Quentin Dolmaire portraying him as an adolescent. The first episode focuses on Paul’s childhood in Roubaix, his mother’s attacks of madness, and his father’s alienating depression. He next 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 rest of his life. Finally, he remembers University life and returning to his hometown to party with his sister and her best friend, his shifting circle of friends and their casual betrayals. Most of all, he remembers Esther (the wonderful Lou Roy-Lecollinet), a beautiful, rude, captivating but troubled soul who was clearly the love of his life. I spoke with acclaimed filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin, director of A Christmas Tale and Kings & Queen, about his latest film.
Danny Miller: There seems to be a Russian-influenced throughline to the film that culminates in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Did you intend this as a kind of metaphor for what was going on with Paul?
Arnaud Desplechin: I grew up in a world that was split into two parts and then suddenly there was one world instead of two. This is what the characters are going through as well. I love that the film uses these motifs. Instead of a straight narrative, I wanted to find a more poetic way to structure the film — the motif of exile, the motif of change and of reunification. And I thought it would be very interesting to go back to this time of the fall of the Wall.
One of the things I love about your films is how every character, no matter how small, is so richly developed. I’m thinking of Rose who is played by the great Françoise Lebrun and the professor from Benin played by Eve Doe-Bruce. These are such plum parts even though they’re quite small.
It’s true that even if a character appears on screen for a very short time, I try to imagine a whole story around them, and I always share that with the actors. Those two you just mentioned, regardless of how much time they’re on the screen, play critical roles in Paul’s development. I also think of that wonderful scene with Paul’s sister, played by Lily Taleb, who thinks that she’s ugly and the father is trying to reassure her. Those are the kinds of moments that just break my heart. And the brother, played by Raphael Cohen, who doesn’t know if he wants to become a priest or go into a life of crime. I love creating these small characters and thinking of their whole life story in order to give the actors what they need.
It must have been so interesting for you to revisit the characters of Paula and Esther 20 years after making My Sex Life. Would you say that they exist in the same universe as the previous film? Do you bristle when people call this film a “prequel?”
No, I don’t mind that at all. But you know, when I cast these young actors for this film, they all asked me if they should watch the other movie and I said “Absolutely not!” I wanted them to invent something new here. I wanted them to speak for their own generation, not for mine. They needed to find their own characters even though I obviously wrote the story and the dialogue. In this film, the young characters are at a place where they are completely rejecting the adults’ world and creating their own. That is what I wanted to get from the actors, and that’s exactly what they did, I was so happy with their performances.
So interesting, and yet it’s uncanny how you can see Quentin Dolmaire growing up to be Mathieu Amalric.
The link between Quentin and Mathieu was amazing. He doesn’t look like him, really, but it turned out that they had exactly the same way of delivering the words. They never even met during the shooting but I invited them both to see a rough cut of the film and after the screening they started talking like they’ve known each other for their entire lives. I wanted each of them to completely invent their own Paul Dédalus. After the screening, Mathie asked Quentin, “But how is it that you were speaking just like me in the film?” And Quentin said, “I was kind of imitating Arnaud, not you.” And Mathieu said that he was, too, to some extent. So I am the third person sharing this mask of Paul Dédalus!
You and Paul Dédalus both come from the same small town. Does it annoy you when people assume more of an autobiographical element to the film than there is?
No, that doesn’t annoy me at all because it’s part of the game that I’m playing! I’m a huge fan of François Truffaut and I love how all of his films kind of feel autobiographical even if they aren’t. I also love novels and storytelling, so I like to mix it all together: creating a sense of autobiography while the characters are going through these novelistic episodes. To be honest, compared to Paul, my life is extremely boring! But I also ask the actors to bring something of themselves to each role. Acting talent is not enough, I want them to give me something autobiographical, something intimate, maybe something shameful that they are hiding.
I love Emmanuelle Devos in many of your movies, including her role as Esther in the original My Sex Life. Did you ever think of using her as the grown-up Esther opposite Mathieu Almaric in this film?
Oh, when I started writing this film it just killed me because I knew that the whole film would be built on the LACK of Esther in Paul’s life later on. I knew I had to leave out Emmanuelle in order to properly tell this story, and I was very sad about that! But did you know that the part of Paul’s brother is played by Emmanuelle’s actual son in real life? He’s wonderful in the part and that was also my way of saying, “Emmanuelle, you’re still here, we’re thinking of you and we miss you!”
That scene at the end of the film where the grown-up Paul meets Kovalki at the concert and then all these emotions pour out of him over drinks was so incredible and it completely changed everything that I’d imagined about Paul and what he’s been doing during the intervening years.
When I first wrote that scene, Paul’s monologue was so long that everyone told me it would never work. I kept saying, “Just wait until Mathieu Almaric arrives, we’ll find a way!” And I just love his performance in that scene. You can see that it took Paul almost his whole life to finally become an adult, he was always so restrained and uncomfortable as a kid, and it’s in this bar when he’s talking to Kovalki that he finally finds himself at last.
And speaking of how great the small roles in your films are, that woman who plays Kovalki’s wife in that scene is extraordinary even though I’m not sure that she has more than a few words of dialogue.
Oh, I love that you mention her, her performance was absolutely perfect! Her name is Judith Davis and she’s really a brilliant actress. I will tell her that you appreciated that, she will love it!
The French title, Trois Souvenirs de Jeunesse or Three Memories of Childhood, has such a different nuance than the English title, My Golden Days. How do you feel about the title being used here?
To be honest, I came up with the American title and I love it! My original title, as I was writing the script, was My Arcadia, which you see as a subtitle early on. It was too obscure to use in French but I though the perfect translation in English was My Golden Days so I actually think that’s better and closer to what I wanted.