La Belle Époque (2019)

Victor, a disillusioned draftsman in his sixties, pays a theatrical company to rebuild the week in 1974 when he met his wife, and then walks into his own memory to see whether the feeling still holds. Nicolas Bedos directs the arrangement with genuine wit and a melancholy that never quite curdles into despair. Daniel Auteuil plays the customer with a tired dignity, and Doria Tillier, as the actress hired to impersonate a woman he once loved, does the harder work of being both a person and a projection.

For those of us who keep a ledger of contemporary social consciousness, the accounts here come back nearly empty. The cast is uniformly white French, and the film has no interest in saying anything about it. There is no queer thread, no climate anxiety, no meditation on bodies or brains. The women are recollections first and agents second: Marianne is the wife Victor wants back, Margot is the actress paid to stand in for her, and both are lit by his nostalgia. A faint satirical glimmer survives in the company that sells fabricated pasts to wealthy clients, and in Victor's grumbling about an overly technological world, but the film never gathers the nerve to turn that into a critique of money. It is a shrug dressed as a premise.

The picture observes and refuses to sermonize. Its historical set pieces, Faulkner and Hitler and the seventeenth century among them, are theatrical artifices rather than arguments about the past. The film leaves us with a tender, well-made romance about a man who cannot stop visiting a room that no longer exists, which is a feeling, not a thesis.