City Cinema: Colours of Time (La venue de l’avenir)

Comedy/Drama.
PG, mature content.
Dir: Cédric Klapisch, France, 2025, 124 min.
Suzanne Lindon, Vassili Schneider, Vincent Macaigne.
In French with English subtitles.

“Past, present and a generous helping of poetic license all merge entertainingly in Cédric Klapisch’s classy Colours of Time. A thoughtful comic meditation on changing social mores it re-examines some much-loved myths and images of French history… In the present day, a diverse group of individuals discover that they are all descended from the same woman: Adèle Meunier, who hails from the Normandy countryside. With Adèle’s abandoned house due for demolition, four descendants undertake to enter the premises and inspect its contents. They are anxious exec Céline, affable neo-hippie beekeeper Guy, French teacher Abdel, and Seb, a young online content creator… Klapisch cuts between this quartet… and the adventures of Adèle who, in the last years of the 19th century, leaves Normandy and heads for Paris, in search of her lost mother… Meanwhile, assorted eminences of the period flit in and out of the action… Klapisch plays the temporal zig-zagging astutely, showing each period reflected in the other… To us, the streets of fin de siècle Paris may look reassuringly calm, but the film also lets us see them through Adèle’s eyes as a frenetic bustle, the newly erected Eiffel Tower looming as a precursor of a barely imaginable era to come…. It’s all part of the pleasure of a film that is unashamedly crowd-pleasing.” —Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily