Early in My Golden Days, as he returns to Paris after years spent in unofficial exile, Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric) discovers that he has a double. Detained by French officials while attempting to enter the country, his explanation to a bemused customs officer (André Dussollier), leads to the recounting of a cloak-and-dagger episode from the character’s youth, involving an impetuous effort to transport funds to persecuted Jewish radicals in Minsk during a school trip, a transaction that ended with Paul gifting a young man his valuable French passport, allowing him to escape to Israel. A further wrinkle is the fact that, in addition to the shadowy counterpart produced by this impulsive decision, Dédalus already has several others: from the director and actor duo for whom he serves as a sort of joint alter ego, to the loosely connected protagonist of 1996’s My Sex Life…or How I Got Into an Argument, Desplechin’s previous account of sexual and professional indecision.
My Golden Days acts as both a follow-up and a prequel, continuing Paul’s general storyline, while also commenting on the concept of film as a memoiristic medium. The many instances of parity and reflection contained therein are fitting, considering the film’s fascination with doubles, installing its egotistical, insecure characters amid a self-referential hall of mirrors. The primary French setting of Paul’s fond ‘80s-era memories—specifically the Roubaix suburbs where Desplechin spent his own youth—finds its opposite in a series of foreign locales, all of them significantly situated behind the Iron Curtain. Meanwhile the neurotic, obsessive Paul meets his match in the sultry, careless Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet), a character who also served as one of the primary fixations of Argument. Here she seems even more significant, her story derailing the tripartite structure (the original French title translates to “Three Memories From My Youth”) by dwarfing two other segments, one devoted to Paul’s tempestuous childhood relationship with his mentally imbalanced mother, another to the aforementioned Minsk episode.
The Dédalus name subtly suggests a relationship to a boy undone by flying too high, but the ironic appellation also conveys the melancholy of having endured but never quite excelled. It’s the perfect label for a character who’s always just scraping by, his early aspirations toward greatness consistently undone by his firm rooting in the realm of his own immediate earthly desires. In Desplechin’s vivid, multifarious reckoning of the possibilities of youth, it’s these insistent shortcomings of self that force his characters to rely so heavily on their expectations of others. Idealized figures like Esther serve as reflective surfaces for damaged people like Paul, blank slates upon which all kinds of qualities can be ascribed, most significantly an enduring sense of mystery. He can’t shake Esther because she’ll never submit to his control, making for a sense allure similar to that of forbidden Eastern Bloc countries. Once the wall comes down—in a significant scene featuring outpourings of East German joy on television matched against Paul’s disappointed face watching this scene of reunification—he’s forced to go even further in search of such mystery, eventually heading east to Tajikstan to study its native peoples.
Portraying the adult Paul as he finally returns from this extended odyssey, Amalric goes from playing one anthropologist—the worldly Georges Devereux of 2013’s Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian—to another, a far-less-worldly character he’s already played once before. Here, however, he’s a marginal figure, appearing in brief scenes to comment on and contextualize those played out by his younger counterpart, another case of doubling, with the past portrayed as foreign of a place as any Central Asian steppe. The film’s concerns also skew similarly to those of Jimmy P, particularly in the willful reduction of complex internal emotions in exchange for easy answers, with the persistent appeal of external mystery complicating the character’s choices. Yet where that film was serious, portentous and ideologically murky, My Golden Days is so deftly and playfully constructed that it seems almost frivolous at first, a lightness that only makes its subtextual web of references, connections and reflections all the more rewarding in retrospect.