Paul Dedalus can be a man of action. The middle-class protagonist of the dynamic yet ultimately melancholy My Golden Days carries a gun into a tense negotiation with a drug dealer, and happily accepts a secret mission to carry documents and cash to Jewish refuseniks while on a high-school trip behind what was then the Iron Curtain.
Yet Paul — like his Irish cousin, James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus — is more observer than doer. In fact, he’s an anthropology student who will grow up to be the central character in director Arnaud Desplechin’s 1996 film, My Sex Life, or … How I Got Into an Argument.
The older Paul is played by Desplechin regular Matthieu Amalric, who also had the role 20 years ago. He appears only in brief framing stories, set in Tajikstan and Paris. The movie belongs to Quentin Dolmaire, soulful and selfish as the teenage Paul, and Lou Roy-Lecollinet, who movingly plays Esther, the troubled girlfriend he can’t comfort, and will never forget.
Despite its references to ancient Greek literature, My Golden Days doesn’t try for classical symmetry. Its French title means “three memories of my youth,” and the film does consist primarily of a trio of episodes, set in the 1970s and ’80s. But the first two are quick and open-ended, while the third is a movie in itself.