‘Colours Of Time’ review: Cédric Klapisch delivers a crowdpleasing comedy of France past and present

Dir. Cédric Klapisch. France 2025. 124 minutes

Previous, current and a beneficiant serving to of poetic license all merge entertainingly in Cédric Klapisch’s elegant, if shamelessly contrived Colors of Time. A considerate comedian meditation on altering social mores over roughly 125 years, Klapisch’s movie re-examines some much-loved myths and pictures of French historical past – notably from the heyday of Impressionism – trying again on the origins of modernity from the vantage level of an anxious current which, the movie contends, has forgotten how one can stay.

Suzanne Lindon is characterfully persuasive in a juicy lead position

Following her hanging debut in 2020’s self-directed Spring Blossom, Suzanne Lindon is characterfully persuasive in a juicy lead position, and buoyant assist from the acquainted likes of Vincent Macaigne, Cécile de France and up-and-comer Paul Kircher – plus Klapisch’s appreciable mainstream status – ought to bode properly for the movie’s French launch instantly following its Cannes Out Of Competitors premiere. Irresistible attraction to old-school Francophiles must also make this the director’s most exportable movie for a while.

Within the current day, a various group of people uncover that they’re all descended from the identical girl: Adèle Meunier (Lindon), who hails from the Normandy countryside. With Adèle’s deserted home due for demolition, 4 descendants undertake to enter the premises and examine its contents. They’re anxious exec Céline (Julia Piaton), affable neo-hippie beekeeper Man (Macaigne), French trainer Abdel (Zinedine Soualem, a long-time Klapisch participant) and Seb (Abraham Wapler), a younger on-line content material creator who’s nearly prepared to start out trying on the world round him in a much less ephemeral gentle.

Klapisch cuts between this quartet – plus their investigative ally, artwork historian Calixte (De France) – and the adventures of Adèle who, within the final years of the nineteenth century, leaves Normandy and heads for Paris, seeking her misplaced mom. She arrives by riverboat, making the acquaintance of two younger hopefuls – painter Anatole (Kircher) and photographer Lucien (Vassili Schneider). Adèle tracks down Maman (a really affecting Sara Giraudeau) and learns her story, whereas transferring in together with her two new associates in then-very-rural Montmartre. In the meantime, assorted eminences of the interval flit out and in of the motion to crisply droll impact, together with Sarah Bernhardt, images pioneer Nadar and one explicit artist whose creations present a key thread all through.

The contrivance could be wilfully goofy, as in a sequence that sees the sleuths visiting the previous on a collective ayahuasca journey. However Klapisch and co-writer Santiago Amigorena play the temporal zig-zagging astutely, exhibiting every interval mirrored within the different. Notably, they display how the Belle Epoque, an age we could also be inclined to treat as quaintly romantic, was perceived by those that lived via it as a flurry of radical change, each heady and disturbing.

To us, the streets of fin de siècle Paris might look reassuringly calm, however the movie additionally lets us see them via Adèle’s eyes as a frenetic bustle, the newly erected Eiffel Tower looming as a precursor of a barely conceivable period to return. The movie’s French title La Venue de l’Avenir means ‘The Coming of the Future’, however can also be a wise little bit of wordplay in a scene involving the electrification of a key thoroughfare, marking the town’s irrevocable transformation.

Marie Cheminal’s manufacturing design and the meticulous re-creation of interval objects, portray and paperwork – just like the treasure trove of weathered memorabilia in Adèle’s home – present an actual sense of tangible substance. Nineteenth-century Paris comes alive because of a combination of studio capturing, CGI and what seems to be very very similar to conventional matte portray, alluding to a practice (each inventive and touristic) of representing the town in work, sepia images and movie postcards.

It’s all a part of the pleasure of a movie that’s unashamedly crowd-pleasing, typically self-mocking in its occasional touches of theme-park kitsch. Colors of Time nudges its viewers somewhat closely, if cheerfully so, with its historic references, and self-confessedly (as per an finish title) performs quick and unfastened in its accuracy, however is genially creative in messing with the codes of interval cinema.