Daniel Auteuil is a man disillusioned with life and marriage who gets a chance to go back in time in this Charlie Kaufman-lite saccharine comedy-drama
Here is a madly overegged, over-sugared pudding of a film by the French writer-director Nicolas Bedos. It’s comedy-drama that is not funny enough to count as a
comedy and not plausible enough to count as a drama. You’re going to need a very sweet tooth for it – sweeter than the one I have.
Daniel Auteuil plays Victor, who is very depressed – a state that Auteuil knows well how to project. Victor is a once-famous children’s book illustrator and graphic novelist, now fallen on hard times and disenchanted with his life and with his stagnant marriage to psychotherapist Marianne (Fanny Ardant). She is having an affair with François (Denis Podalydès), the newspaper editor who fired Victor from his job as a cartoonist. But Victor has a possible saviour – a fan of his work called Antoine (Guillaume Canet) who makes a good living devising immersive theatrical experiences, private Truman Show-style rides for plutocrats who fancy going back to the late 19th century, or maybe a belle époque in their own youth.