La Belle Époque review – charming foray into the past

Like the French-language love child of The Truman Show and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, La Belle Époque is a film with its head stuck firmly in the past. Written and directed by Nicolas Bedos as though channelling some unused idea abandoned by Charlie Kaufman, it’s an engaging – if eventually overlong – drama-comedy with a killer concept: what if you could hire a company to reconstruct a specific time in the past so that you could act out your wildest fantasies?

Daniel Auteuil is Victor, a former newspaper cartoonist whose life has come to a complete stand still. He’s deeply out of touch with the world, to the extent that his own son – a successful creative type – makes fun of him at dinner in front of other people. Meanwhile, Victor’s mean-spirited wife, Marianne – played by Fanny Ardant – has come to loathe her husband’s lack of ambition, and is even having an affair with the man who fired him from his job at the newspaper. After she kicks Victor out on the street, he decides to cash in on a recent birthday gift from his son: a “time travel” experience that allows a person to visit any period of history they might desire by way of meticulous set-building and hired actors. It’s operated by Antoine (Guillaume Canet), a mad genius and womaniser with relationship issues of his own. Desperate to relive the moment he fell in love with Marianne, Victor chooses the 1974 Lyon bar where they first met, where she will be played by the talented but jaded Margot (Doria Tillier) and for whom Victor will develop feelings.

A premise like this can only come with high expectations, and it’s only after an odd opening scene – one that does an admittedly terrible job of explaining the film’s central idea – that La Belle Époque settles into a breezy, freewheeling style that fully immerses you into its faux world. Like with Midnight in Paris, Bedos sets out to skewer the romantic notion that “the past is better,” but he simultaneously indulges his main character’s nostalgic urge to exist in a simpler time, free from the newfangled gadgets and technology he finds so disorienting. At points, we also get a glimpse into other client’s hand-picked fantasies, from a Nazi-bashing wish fulfilment epic, to a drinking session with Hemingway. Of course, Victor’s own request had to be enticing to us, too, and the Lyon bar that he returns to, night after night, with its cosy, lamp-lit exterior and purple signage, very quickly becomes a place we’re also keen to revisit.

Implausible, sure, but as with Kaufman’s output, a leap of faith is required to get the most out of the film. And whilst La Belle Époque is broad in places, a slightly cynical undercurrent keeps it from lapsing into true sentimentalism. Occasionally it’s a little hectic and messy, and you wonder whether it might have been better for Bedos to have slowed things down at points (then again, perhaps he felt that doing so would call everything into question). The characters, too, are on the inconsistent side, and their journeys towards being better people feel somewhat forced by the time the whole charade comes to an end; in some moments it’s hard to have sympathy for them in the way the film asks – especially in the case of Victor’s wife. But these are minor quibbles in a film that is always charming and attractive and inventive; one that will leave you wondering what your own belle époque might look like. Are we that far off, anyway?

★★★★☆

By: Tom Barnard

Get La Belle Époque showtimes in London.