My Golden Days | Independent Ethos

My Golden Days explores the distorting filter of time with keen storytelling and powerful performances

March 30, 2016

“I am not Ulysses. No nostalgia for my country,” says the anthropologist Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric) to a lover in Greece. With a title like My Golden Days, you might be forgiven to think this is indeed a nostalgia piece, but this is a film by Arnaud Desplechin, a French filmmaker who understands how to pick apart sentiment to its raw core. He understands that memories are fragments within shards of moments that wipe each other away and are never true records of the past. Time is a moment that as soon as it is considered has been altered from that moment. Desplechin is keenly aware of this, using cinematic devices like iris shots to transition between scenes that speak to the tunnel vision of memory and the filter of time. With My Golden Days, he focuses on first love and how it can haunt and form our beings as told in retrospect by Paul, who sometimes has trouble remembering things.

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Posted by Hans

Filed in Film, Miami area screenings, Miami International Film Festival, Reviews
Tagged: Arnaud Desplechin, Bill Cosford Cinema, Julie Peyr, Lou Roy-Lecollinet, Mathieu Amalric, Miami Beach Cinematheque, My Golden Days, My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument, Quentin Dolmaire

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Reflecting on 2015, Part 4 – Best Films according to Hans

January 12, 2016

Mid-year, I teased my working lists of The best films of 2015 … so far. It’s finalized. Four films had their premieres at either Miami Dade College’s Miami International Film Festival or its mid-season Gems event. I had the chance to catch up with one of these films (Flowers) thanks to the Coral Gables Art Cinema booking it even without a distributor. It later became Spain’s entry to the Oscars and was picked up by Music Box Films. Another movie had its premiere at the Miami Jewish Film Festival. But I’m spoiling the suspense already…

Now, in reverse order and capped off with 10 honorable mentions with links to reviews where appropriate, are the 10 best movies I saw in 2015. Where available, all titles link to the item description page on Amazon. If you purchase via the link provided, you will be financially supporting this blog.

10. The Forbidden Room

The only film in my top 10 I did not review. Suffice to say that The Forbidden Room is an incredible experience of dreams and primal desires infused with that indelible Guy Maddin sense of humor.