Cédric Klapisch “La Venue de l’avenir” / “The Colours of Time” (2025)
A derelict country house in Normandy, long abandoned by its last occupant, is an unlikely catalyst for a reflection on family history and the past, and the impact that knowing who your ancestors are and what they did in the past can have on your own life and your future. Four strangers who are distant cousins discover that they and 26 others are heirs to an abandoned farmhouse slated for demolition to make way for a parking lot to a massive supermarket. The extended family chooses these strangers – Seb (Abraham Wapler), Guy (Vincent Macaigne), Céline (Julia Piaton) and Abdelkrim (Zinedine Soualem) – to represent its interests in the house and so the four visit the house along with the developer and the local mayor to see what value lies therein. While looking around the various rooms, Seb – who has not been sleeping well lately due to work commitments – has to lie down. While napping, he dreams of his ancestor, Adèle (Suzanne Lindon), as a young woman who in 1895 is leaving the farmhouse after her grandmother’s death to find her mother, whom she has never seen since she was a baby, in Paris. While riding the dray, Adèle promises to local farmhand Gaspard that she will return after she locates her mother.
There then follow two tales in parallel, in which a provincial girl arrives in the Big Smoke to discover her origins, and while doing so meets two young aspiring artists, photographer Lucien (Vassily Schneider) and painter Anatole (Paul Kircher); and four strangers piece together a mystery connecting two photographic portraits, an Impressionist-styled painting and an old used paint-cloth, all found in the abandoned farmhouse. In both tales, seemingly separated by time – at least until beekeeper Guy suggests a group ritual in which everyone plus art expert Calixte (Cécile de France) partake of some powerful ayahuasca brew, with the most riotous results – the action proceeds leisurely and in a sane manner, in sanitised and romanticised settings. Adèle very quickly (too quickly perhaps) finds lodgings and her mother – and her mother’s occupation – in La Belle Époque Paris, and her unlikely friendships with Lucien and Anatole bring her into contact with famous artistic celebrities such as photographer Félix Nadar, painter Claude Monet, writer Victor Hugo and actress Sarah Bernhardt. Seb and the others all learn something of Adèle’s life through letters they discover in the house: letters that speak of her affections with Anatole and Gaspard, and which trace her learning to read and write, and eventually to become a teacher, which deeply impresses Abdel, himself a teacher about to retire after having taught some 4,000 students over many years. The foursome also make a discovery that may link Adèle to the burgeoning Impressionist movement in late nineteenth-century French art.
The acting overall is competent – several actors in this film happen to be the offspring of other actors – but characters tend to be rather flat and one-dimensional. Any revelations or words of wisdom uttered throughout the film tend to be banal – Adèle’s mother Odette (Sara Girardeau) tells her daughter to grasp whatever opportunities come her way – and Seb becomes a happier, more purposeful and less restless person as a result of learning about Adèle and her life, and connecting with his distant cousins.
The Paris visited by Adèle is a wealthy, cultured city where new technologies such as electricity and automobiles are eagerly embraced, and even a common prostitute like Odette can take the time to walk in spacious city parks in lovely expensive clothes. In this Paris, the existence of slums and extreme poverty, of cholera and other epidemics arising from the lack of proper city sanitation, of child sex trafficking, and of violent crime such as serial murder and terrorist bomb attacks, is all hushed up. Likewise, the Paris where Seb, Guy, Céline and Abdelkarim live and work is a socially progressive city of wide, clean streets, art museums, a mostly sanitised pop culture – and no protest movements.
As with many other contemporary French films that briefly and superficially touch on social and political issues such as urban overdevelopment and the corruption that may be involved, at the expense of preserving buildings of historical value, the film’s conclusion is left open-ended so (spoiler alert) we never discover what actually happens to the farmhouse and the various treasures that Seb and his cousins find. It seems ironic that after all they have found about the farmhouse and its last inhabitant, and what they have learned about themselves and the value of family and the importance of the past, the one thing they have yet to learn is the importance of preserving what is most valuable from the past over money.