My Golden Days

"My Golden Days" came out in 2015 as a late-breaking prequel to Desplechin's mid-90s classic "My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument," which may be the best film since "Lucky Jim" about life on the lower rungs of the academic ladder. Once again, Mathieu Amalric plays Paul Dédalus, now returning to France after a decade or so doing ethnographic fieldwork in the former Soviet Union; a farewell tryst with his gorgeous Russian girlfriend (Dinara Drukarova) unleashes a cascade of memories:

In a brief prologue, 10-year-old Paul flees his mentally unstable mother and takes refuge with his great-aunt and her Russian lover. Next, he recounts a daring high-school exploit to an urbane French spook, who wonders why he (and his passport) have doppelgangers in Australia (long story!), and in the longest, most significant episode, he relives an intense love affair with a classmate of his younger sister's, Esther, a clever, soulful, sexy, needy, neurotic young woman (she grows up to be Emmanuelle Devos in "My Sex Life"; here she's played brilliantly by Lou Roy-Lecollinet).

Trigger warning: Paul and Esther communicate in improvised love lyrics (as befits two alumni of the Lycée Baudelaire); Esther's pouty histrionics may evoke bittersweet memories of post-adolescent romance, or may just seem too precious to be endured. Your call!

This final episode starts to drag a bit as Paul soldiers on as an unfunded grad student in Paris, sleeping in hostels, couch surfing and ménage-à-trois-ing it with a congenial older couple while Esther mopes her way through "a stupid college course" and cheats on him repeatedly. Luckily, Desplechin props up his sometimes rambling storyline with ingenious staging and cinematography: When Paul first approaches Esther, he's surrounded by a windblown swirl of fallen leaves, which is echoed in the final scene as he strides into what looks like a blizzard of torn-out pages from a book (they're both "feuilles" in French, I guess; does it mean that this chapter in his life is coming to an end?); hard to put into words but it's a lovely effect.

Finally I should mention the first-rate period soundtrack: The Specials, De La Soul, "Atomic Dog" and Run-D.M.C. It's a remarkable film, though, again, a certain tolerance for post-Truffaut coming-of-age shenanigans is required.