TROIS SOUVENIRS DE MA JEUNESSE

Paul Dédalus (played by the frenetic Mathieu Amalric), the travelling anthropologist we first met in Comment je me suis disputé... (ma vie sexuelle) and Un conte de Noël, returns to France and reminisces over three important moments of his life. The first is L’enfance, with its partner-in-crime siblings, depressed father, dead mother and Russian great aunt. Then, in La Russie, the teenaged Dédalus (played by Quentin Dolmaire, a 21st century Charles Denner) goes on a school trip to Minsk and becomes a hero in spite of himself. Finally, there’s Esther, a tale of passionate first love that serves as the heart of the film, and whose title character is played by Lou Roy-Lecollinet (a kind of Nordic Bernadette Lafont). Since his 1991 début film, La vie des morts, Desplechin has created a fantastic, off-the-wall and sensitive universe all his own. Underneath his intellectual, auteurist exterior lies a formidable storyteller and master of cinematographic expression. It’s impossible not to see the influences of Truffaut and Doillon on his work, the former in his keen awareness of childhood and adolescence and the latter in his artful close-ups of bodies and faces. Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse is as cruel and sweet as youth itself, with Desplechin making palpable the daydreams and memories we carry with us to our last breath.