Les Jours venus (2015)
Directed by Romain Goupil

Film Review

"Whatever happened to me?" could well have been the title of Romain Goupil's most recent film, a humorous and not entirely flattering self-portrait in which the now sixty-three-year old filmmaker has to acknowledge that even the most committed of Trotskyists (as he was in his wild youth) cannot escape the curse of bourgeoisification. There's not much trace of the firebrand who founded the group of students (Comité d'action lycéen) that played a prominent role in the uprisings of May 1968.  Now Goupil is settled in his old age, more concerned with his son's performance at school and keeping order in his apartment block than in overthrowing the established order.  (Proving that one's political allegiances shift rightwards as you get older, Goupil famously sided with the neo-conservatives in his support of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.)  At one point he admits to being glad that the world is run by older folk - just think of the mess that would result if hot-headed twenty-somethings like his former self ever got to run the show.  As you age, you change - it's a fact of life, and that's essentially what Goupil's latest film Les Jours venus is about.  The day comes when you give up trying to change the world and settle down to lead a quite life in your own little nest.  Age makes hypocrites of us all.

In this good-natured, if not to say slightly batty film (which makes more than a few knowing nods to Fellini's 8½), Goupil takes an almost perverse delight in mocking his present circumstances.  Having failed to sell one ludicrous idea for his next film to his producer (a wonderfully scathing Noémie Lvovsky) he comes up with another one that is even more bananas, before settling on a scenario for the kind of commercial pap that he would have vilified just a few years earlier.  Everywhere he goes he sees desirable young women and he imagines they are as equally attracted to him (well, he is remarkably well-preserved for a man in his mid-sixties).  His allusions are cruelly shattered when one such object of desire that takes his fancy on the Paris Métro stands up, turns to him and, instead of throwing herself onto him as he expects, offers him her seat.  She might just have well pointed him in the direction of the nearest funeral parlour.

His devilishly attractive bank manager (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) looks as if she might be a pushover, but all she wants to do is talk about his films and lecture him on his politics.  Still, he might one day be able to sweet-talk her into taking him down into the vault, and failing that there's always Marie (Marina Hands)... Goupil's romantic fantasies are clearly the delusion of an old man who still thinks he has the sexual magnetism of a young buck, and you wonder why he still needs to flirt when he has such a devoted family.  And a happy family it is to, as they prove on their outing to Sarajevo, the city where Goupil met and fell in love with the woman who became his wife.  If only his son Jules didn't regard him as something from the Dark Ages and stopped referring to him as a soixante-huitard and showed his aged grandfather a bit more respect and worked harder at school and didn't keep getting into trouble with his mates and (...) Goupil would have to admit to having the perfect family, which is presumably why they agreed to appear as themselves in his film.

On three occasions, Goupil comes within an inch of death when a piano comes crashing out of the sky for no apparent reason.  This prompts him to organise his own funeral, as economically as possible.  The day comes when Goupil 's nearest and dearest are gathered around his coffin, all visibly distraught by the loss of a truly great man.  The cortège does not pan out as Goupil intended so he commands a re-take (you guessed it - it's just a scene for his next film).  Nerves soon get frayed as Goupil starts playing the great dictator (prompting his old friend Daniel Cohn-Bendit to remark: "Trotskyist one day, tyrant always!") and before we know it the actors (who include a visibly hacked off Mathieu Amalric) start hurling insults at the now incandescent director as they walk off the set.  This is what Goupil's life has come to - filming his own funeral and shouting abuse at his actors.  Not the most glorious of outcomes for the man who once believed he could change the world.  Grouchy obsolescence comes to us all.

Film Synopsis

On realising he is now sixty, the filmmaker Romain Goupil decides it is time to take stock of his life.  The former militant Troskyist has long given up wanting to change the world.  Now he is content to run the residents' association for the apartment block where he lives a tame middle-class existence with his wife and their teenage children.  Romain still wants to make films but he is having a hard time selling his latest project, about a man who provokes a disaster every time he takes a photograph, to his sceptical producer.  One person who hasn't lost faith in his abilities as a filmmaker is his bank manager, who is more willing to talk about his previous films than the present state of his personal finances.  On the domestic front, Romain is worried by his father's approaching blindness and his son's disappointing exam results.  But what preoccupies him most is his impending death...