THE STORY – United by the unexpected inheritance of a house in Normandy, four estranged cousins discover their family history. While exploring the house, left untouched since the 1940s, they excavate the life of their ancestor, Adèle Vermillard, a 20-year-old woman who lived there in 1895. Through back-and-forth journeys between 1895 and 2025, they find in the relics of the past what will help them better envision their own future.
THE CAST – Suzanne Lindon, Abraham Wapler, Vincent Macaigne, Julia Platon, Zinedine Soualem, Paul Kircher, Vassil Schneider & Cecile de France
THE TEAM – Cédric Klapisch (Director/Writer) & Santiago Amigorena (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 125 Minutes
Writer-director Cédric Klapisch (“Pot Luck”) makes his long-awaited Cannes debut with this delightful period drama / coming-of-age story. It is screening Out of Competition and being released in French cinemas on the same day. Inventive, cleverly structured, and beautifully written, it’s a thoroughly engaging story enlivened by a terrific ensemble cast.
The film opens in an art gallery, where twenty-something photographer Seb (Abraham Wapler) is doing a fashion shoot with his model-slash-influencer girlfriend Rose (Raika Hazanavicius) in front of a famous Monet painting. When the marketing team complains that the color of the dress clashes with the background, Rose casually suggests that they “just change the color of the painting” in the digital edit. Seb’s reaction to that comment isn’t recorded, but the scene sets up a theme that will resonate throughout the film in several intriguing ways. After the shoot, Seb attends a meeting, where he learns he is one of several people who have inherited a remote house in Normandy that has been untouched since 1940. Chosen as one of four people to represent the group, Seb joins kindly school teacher Abdel (Zinedine Soualem), business executive Celine (Julia Piaton), and bee-keeper Guy (Vincent Macaigne) as they enter the house, where they discover a painting of a young woman that Abdel suspects may be valuable. Intrigued, the four newly united cousins dig through the house’s contents and begin to piece together the story of their relative, a woman named Adele Vermillard (Suzanne Lindon), who lived in the house in 1895. Thereafter, the film flips back and forth between 2025 and 1895, where twenty-year-old Adele travels to Paris in search of her mother, Odette (Sara Giraudeau), and strikes up a friendship with both Anatole (Paul Kircher), a young painter, and Lucien (Vassili Schneider), a young photographer. Meanwhile, in the present day, Seb, Abdel, Celine, and Guy each experience their own journey of self-discovery as more and more details of Adele’s story come to light.
Though it has been renamed “Colors of Time,” the film’s original title was “La venue de l’avenir,” a French phrase that translates to “the arrival of the future.” This neatly encapsulates the film’s key themes, particularly with regard to its deliberate setting in 1895, a period that saw both the birth of photography and the emergence of the Impressionist movement, which would have a profound impact on painting.
The pleasurably literate script, co-written by Klapisch and Argentine writer Santiago Amigorena, makes that conflict explicit by having Lucien repeatedly tease Anatole, saying that photography is about to kill off painting forever. In turn, this echoes into the future, where Seb is inspired to follow his own artistic passions when he shoots a music video and sparks a connection with Fleur (real-life musician Claire Pommet, known professionally as Pomme).
Klapisch has form when it comes to depicting a romantic atmosphere, and those skills are very much in evidence here, most notably in a pair of charming scenes that perfectly capture the ambiance of late nineteenth-century Paris. The first occurs when Adele, Lucien, and Anatole arrive in Paris by boat, glimpsing the six-year-old Eiffel Tower, while the second has them scrambling up some steps in Montmartre to witness the city being lit up by electric light for the first time. Throughout the film, Klapisch deploys a series of inventive transitions between past and present. The beginning of Adele’s story is rather clumsy by comparison (Seb falls asleep in the house and begins to dream of her). Still, subsequent transitions are much more satisfying, whether it’s cutting from past to present scenes unfolding in the same Paris location or the film’s stylistic highlight, a wonderful sequence that cuts between Adele’s hometown boyfriend dictating a letter to her, Anatole reading her in the letter in Paris (he’s teaching her to read and write, in return for her posing for his paintings) and the four cousins discovering the letter and reading it aloud in the present.
That interconnection between the past and the present is a key part of what makes the film work, and Klapisch makes it seem effortless. He pulls off a similar trick with repeated imagery and a focus on objects—there’s a particular pay-off regarding some streaks of orange paint that is extremely satisfying on both a romantic and an artistic level in terms of storytelling. At a key point, Klapisch takes something of a gamble when it comes to that central theme, having the present collide with the past in a scene where the cousins all take Ayahuasca (at Guy’s insistence), which transports them into 1895, enabling them to interact with a room full of 1895 celebrities. This could have gone horribly wrong, but the writing is so assured that it results in one of the film’s funniest scenes, as Celine excitedly gushes to Guy that she got hit on by Victor Hugo.
The performances are excellent across the board. Wapler, in particular, is terrific as a sensitive and thoughtful Seb, effectively anchoring the film as the main character of the present-day sequences and generating strong romantic chemistry with Pommet to boot. Similarly, Lindon is superb as Adele, delivering a tender and touching portrayal – her scenes with Kircher are especially charming. On top of that, there’s reliably strong comic support from Macaigne, while Zinedine Soualem (who looks a lot like Jon Turturro) delivers a moving and dignified performance as Abdel. There are also a pair of enjoyable extended cameos from both Cecile de France (who had an early role in “Pot Luck”), as Abdel’s art expert friend, and from Vincent Perez, as Lucien’s wealthy uncle.
Part of the joy of the film lies in the various reveals about Adele’s life, so it would be churlish to reveal them here, but rest assured: This is a thoroughly enjoyable mixture of period drama, romance, and a coming-of-age story that’s extremely rewarding in its thoughtful central theme of the connection between past and future.
