Les Plus belles années d'une vie

A slow pleasant look at love and aging. The comic parts are few but really funny. Enjoyable way to spend the evening.

A year ago, I saw Un homme et une femme, 20 ans déjà (1986), a sequel of Un homme et une femme (1966). As much as the latter film was a masterpiece, so much the former was frankly disappointing, bad, never to be looked at to not destroy the magic of A man and a woman. I was therefore very apprehensive about this new sequel.

Fortunately, with Les Plus belles années d'une vie (2019), Claude Lelouch did not miss his shot. We quickly fall under the spell felt by viewing A man and a woman. Trintignant and Aimée are now 88 and 86 respectively. Trintignant's character is impotent, body and mind. Aimée's character is vibrant and wants to remain so. The characters are rejuvenated by frequent flashbacks, just enough, not too much. They make little escapades that are sometimes dreams, sometimes real outings; it's an existence in the context of a retirement home. But the warmth of their love pierces the screen. If they were 20, maybe 10 years younger, they would relive their embrace in room 26 of a certain hotel in Deauville. Old, they have the chance to relive their love for the last segment of their existence.

We loved A man and a woman because in that film done with no budget and with a single hand-held camera, we were deeply attached to characters who lived a love story that was simple and sublime at the same time. We love The Best Years of a Life because, with emotion, we remember that attachment.

And we realize with equal emotion that Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée are probably playing in their ultimate film, on a twilight background. Jean-Louis and Anouk, we love you.

It's probably not a coincidence that the international word for a film director who authors his work as a labor of personal expression is "auteur", a French word, and the French are very, very good at it. So is Claude Lelouch. One may dislike the work of an auteur, or dislike what the auteur has to say, but nobody can deny that a particular director is just that: an auteur. Claude Lelouch is one. His first film came out only two years after Truffaut's Les quatre cents coups (1959) and Lelouch authored his masterpiece Un homme et une femme (1966) right in the middle of the 60ies and the New Wave, in France. A film that won numerous awards including the Oscar and was filmed on a shoestring with one 35 mm film camera handheld by Lelouch himself, half the film in Black & White because he could not afford to finish it with color stock. His colleagues and his compatriots never recognized him as part of the New Wave and never gave him his dues. I met the man once in 1983 and I asked him a question about his work. His response floored me. To me he has always been a true New Wave auteur with his very own, unique story to tell and ways in which to tell it... But that's just me.

He was maligned for bringing out Un homme et une femme, 20 ans déjà (1986) and yet that twenty-years-later continuation of the story of Jean-Louis and Anne, always starring the incomparable royalty of French Cinema Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée was very human, even totally believable and teeming with Lelouch authorship signatures. Beats me why folks trashed it.

Now comes Les plus belles années d'une vie, The Best Years of a Life (2019), 33 years after the second film, 53 years after the original masterpiece (but for the sake of the story it is treated as 50 years), with Jean-Louis Trintignant 89 years old and Anouk Aimée, 87, when this film was shot. Handsome and beautiful as ever, commanding like, indeed, royalty of cinema, in a love lost and found, in real life and daydreams. The same actors who played Anne's daughter and Jean-Louis' son at 7 years old in the original masterpiece, reprise the roles of Francoise and Antoine, now 57 years old, as Antoine cares for his father, now in a specialized home for old-age loss of memory. Also reprising her original role, the 1965 white Mustang no. 184 from the Monte Carlo Rally. And in the role of the haven where dreams might have come true, Deauville, the ocean beach, two and a half hours' drive from Paris. What is reality, what is dream and what is fantasy. Does it matter?

In this outing, Jean-Louis and Anne bring their story to a full circle that instead of closure provides hope and new beginnings. The line that closes the film comes after the end of the roll of the end-credits, so, wait for it. Anne, on Antoine's request, decides to visit ailing Jean-Louis in the hope that her presence might help his memory. After all, as Antoine explained, she is the only part of his life that he remembers, because she was his best memory. Will he remember her if she stands before him in real life today?

Throughout the film, their story is told with original footage and references from the 1966 film. But there is no reference whatsoever to the 1986 film and the events of that time. Perhaps the public succeeded in making Lelouch afraid to reference the film they did not like. But I think he should have. It is a part of the story we know. I'm sorry he left it out of the narrative of their lives.

I don't know any other filmmaker, any auteur, who use decades and generations to tell a story and Lelouch has done that very often. He is a master at it, and nobody can deny him that.

The Best Years of a Life is a beautiful film and thought-provoking. It stands very well on its own two feet.

I admit having approached this film with a negative a priori, considering that it would probably be the tenth film in a row directed by Claude Lelouch which deserves the qualifier of « it's the film too much... again ». Strongly based on his Oscar-winning masterpiece Un homme et une femme (1966), Claude Lelouch offers us a touching and tender work and finds back this sensitivity that I thought was lost: memories and reality all intermingle and create a mesmerizing atmosphere, thanks to Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant, both outstanding and moving. Moreover, Anouk Aimée is still gorgeous. As a synthesis: 5/6 of 10.

I confess that I have never been a big fan of Claude Lelouch. 'A Man and a Woman' ('Un homme et une femme') did not make a strong impression on me more than half a century ago when I first saw him. I felt then that Lelouch puts too much emphasis on the music and the aesthetics of the image to the detriment of the emotions and the sincerity of the story unfolding on the screen. I stand by that opinion. I came out of the screening of his new film, 'Les plus belles années d'une vie', which brings back the lead characters with similar sensations. Almost a lifetime has passed over the actors, over the director, and over part of the audience. The actors have aged beautifully and they represent the luminous part of this film. The director seems to have remained true to his views. I, as a spectator, was not impressed now either.

Claude Lelouch, however, had good reasons to return to the love story that he made famous between Anne (Anouk Aimée) and Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant). The two huge French actors are still here, and the opportunity to bring them on screen in consistent roles is a delight for the public, for the director who has the happy opportunity to work with them, and, I hope, for them as well. Trintignant, visibly limited phisically, has a difficult role, which he fulfills with a nonchalance and charm stronger even than the ones he offered in his glory days. Anouk Aimée radiates beauty - physical beauty little touched by time completed by the inner nobility in resonance with the role she plays.

'Les plus belles années d'une vie' addresses a very serious and painful topic, that of the age that is increasingly affecting the memory and the mental functions of aged persons before the physical ones. The subject has been approached in a few films in recent years, some of them succeeding to present different and often emotional aspects of this kind of problems that more and more of us, ourselves or our families are facing. The reunion after many years between Anne and Jean-Louis, the woman's attempt to recover some of the man's affective memory by reminding her of the love affair they once lived and carrying him through the places where this had happened, could have added yet another consistent cinematic creation. It was not to be, because Lelouch didn't resist the temptation to quote excessively from his highly successful film and to use the same techniques that drown emotion in music. The scenes that I liked the most in the film are those in which the two elders interact with each other, trying to climb, with hesitant steps, the ladder of memories. The scenes that I liked the least are the superimposed images and the episode featuring Monica Bellucci , which seems artificially added. 'Les plus belles ans d'un vie' gives us the pleasure of seeing Trintignant and Anouk Aimée together, but not much more. Trintignant had a similar experience, on a similar theme, with Michael Haneke in 'Amour'. The same acting skills have served there a profound and ruthless film, while here we remain in the comfort zone of the kitsch.