Trois Souvenirs de ma jeunesse (My golden days)
Crit
Sorry, I can't help using the P-word: it's French, it's about la mémoire, et Maman, et l'amour . . . it's Proustian, dammit!
More than that, Paul Dédalus--bearing a name with as heavy a mythic freight as has been encountered recently, and played as an adult by the national treasure Mathieu Amalric, as a teen and young adult by Quentin Dolmaire--is an overthinking, overfeeling Proustian protagonist in his own right, and Esther (a bit of nomenclatural freight there, too; played by Lou Roy-Lecollinet, who at times calls to mind a young Emmanuelle Devos) is the Proustian love interest, the deck stacked against her as much by the protagonist's inability to be satisfied in love as by her own inconstancy.
That story is the third memory of the title (and a nod is due the English-language distributors who gave us a translation title so bland and clichéd--and ironic, I guess, though I'm not sure we can credit the distributors with that much thought; thanks from protecting us from the hopelessly obscure poetry that, say, the literal Three Memories of My Youth, or even the truncated Three Memories would have imposed on us), the longest but not the most interesting. That would be the second memory, of the involvement of 16-year-old Paul and a friend in a mission to help refuseniks escape the Soviet Union for Israel. That adventure, and the "identity loss" that results for Paul, resonates a bit later, but when I remake the film, that will be at its center.
More than that, Paul Dédalus--bearing a name with as heavy a mythic freight as has been encountered recently, and played as an adult by the national treasure Mathieu Amalric, as a teen and young adult by Quentin Dolmaire--is an overthinking, overfeeling Proustian protagonist in his own right, and Esther (a bit of nomenclatural freight there, too; played by Lou Roy-Lecollinet, who at times calls to mind a young Emmanuelle Devos) is the Proustian love interest, the deck stacked against her as much by the protagonist's inability to be satisfied in love as by her own inconstancy.
That story is the third memory of the title (and a nod is due the English-language distributors who gave us a translation title so bland and clichéd--and ironic, I guess, though I'm not sure we can credit the distributors with that much thought; thanks from protecting us from the hopelessly obscure poetry that, say, the literal Three Memories of My Youth, or even the truncated Three Memories would have imposed on us), the longest but not the most interesting. That would be the second memory, of the involvement of 16-year-old Paul and a friend in a mission to help refuseniks escape the Soviet Union for Israel. That adventure, and the "identity loss" that results for Paul, resonates a bit later, but when I remake the film, that will be at its center.
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