La Belle Époque

Victor Drumond is a disillusioned man in his sixties whose marriage has gone stale. When his wife Marianne throws him out, his son Maxime turns to a friend, the entrepreneur Antoine, whose company offers wealthy clients a chance to step back into an era of their choosing using film sets, actors and stagecraft. Victor picks a week in 1974, the time when he first met Marianne, and as the reconstruction draws him in, the line between memory and performance begins to blur.

Nicolas Bedos wrote and directed the film, his second feature after Mr & Mme Adelman, and it sits before OSS 117: From Africa with Love and Masquerade in his filmography. Daniel Auteuil plays Victor, with Fanny Ardant as Marianne, Guillaume Canet as Antoine, Doria Tillier as Margot and supporting turns from Pierre Arditi and Denis Podalydès. It was produced by François Kraus, Denis Pineau-Valencienne and Ardavan Safaee through Orange Studio, Pathé, France 2 Cinéma and uMedia, on a budget of about 11 million dollars, and took roughly 14 million dollars worldwide.

Audiences rate it 7.4 out of 10 on IMDb from some 22,000 votes and the same on TMDB from just over a thousand. Critics were more favourable still, at 7.8 out of 10 from 31 reviews, so the film landed somewhat better with reviewers than with the wider public.