THIS subtitled French film is about a return to the past for a middle-aged woman, facing divorce, to a time in high school when she has the opportunity of changing significant happenings in her life.
She has the chance of not falling for the man, who, in the present, has left her.
There are many other things she needs to alter as well, but altering life can have serious consequences.
If she doesn’t partner the man who left her, she will never have given birth to the daughter (Judith Chemla) she loves deeply.
The movie is directed by the woman who takes its leading role, and was nominated for 12 Cesar Awards in 2013.
It is derivative of Francis Ford Coppola’s, Peggy Sue Got Married (1985), which is about a woman facing divorce, who travels back to high school to live her life again and is wooed by her husband-to-be.
Camille Vaillant (Noemie Lvovsky) is a hard-drinking actress who is no longer considered suitable for glamorous roles.
She is 41 years old and has married her high school sweetheart, Eric (Samir Guesmi), who has run off with a much younger woman.
After an interaction with an eccentric clock merchant (Jean-Pierre Leaud), that cues us to the time distortion that is about to happen, she slips into an alcoholic daze at a New Year’s Eve party, passes out, and finds herself projected into her teenage-past.
She wakes up in a French hospital in the 1980s, and re-experiences life at the age of 16.
In living her life again, she tries not to commit the same errors. One of those is being attracted to Eric, who she knows will leave her.
Another is failing to tell her mother (Yolande Moreau) enough that she loves her, and doing something about the fatal heart attack that she knows will claim her life.
There is an important artifice that threads through almost the entire movie. Camille always looks 40-ish, but those around her see her, and relate to her, as if she is only 16.
The movie is essentially a fantasy that resurrects the chance of redefining relationships to make them better.
It canvasses the themes of death, friendship, forgiveness and love, and does so by introducing comic elements into the drama to make these themes more acceptable.
The movie uses nostalgia intriguingly as a way of putting things right, and its gentleness allows deep and reflective comment on times gone by.
There are reflective overtones to the movie that make one think philosophically on life in general.
As Camille says, “If you knew your life in advance, what would you change?”, and we see that Camille’s behaviour isn’t all that different at 16 than what it is at 41.
It doesn’t matter a great deal whether Camille’s time-travel is fantasy or real.
It is her efforts to change things that make the film ultimately interesting and compelling.
The movie starts off slightly, but as it develops Lvovsky absorbingly takes you deep inside her own thoughts.
The artifice of being 16, while we know Camille looks 40, works well in creating a number of comic moments that we enjoy, but it also facilitates the introduction of serious themes.
It tells us, for example, that not even hindsight of a mother’s death can forestall the inevitability of the loss that will occur.
This is a bitter-sweet, romance movie that is stylish in a very French way, and it is energetic and enjoyable.
It is thoughtful without being too bitter, and pushes one to think twice about life’s choices.
Its charm makes the film a crowd-pleaser, but the movie aims to make sure that we question seriously, or at least contemplate, the choices we have already made in life.
Peter W. Sheehan is an associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting.
