In 1985 suburban Paris, 12-year-old Vincent lives with his distant older brother and quarrelling parents. Amid laughter and unease, he navigates friendship and first love, while beginning to confront the adult world.
Louis Garrel
Camille Cottin
The Ritz, Penzance
The Ritz, Penzance
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Thoughts
Paris suburbs, 1985. Vincent is nearly thirteen: too old for the version of himself his family still addresses, too young for the one arriving. An older brother who won't let him in, parents whose arguments are the weather of the house, a mother from Algeria and a father from Morocco, and a Jewish household where questions about God, girls and loyalty all turn up in the same month.
This is a film where a self is being built rather than surrendered. A thrteen-year-old is overhearing adults and assembling a sense of who he is out of borrowed material, most of it inherited and some of it misheard. That is this season's subject seen through a comic and nostalgic lens. And the dream is here too, in the other sense the title points at: 1985 filmed forty years later from inside two directors' own childhoods is a reverie, not a reconstruction, and the illusion being named is the belief, held at thirteen, that the world can be changed. Nakache and Toledano are France's great popular entertainers, and this is the first time they have turned that gift to remember their own families. The film is dedicated to their fathers, who died during the shoot.