Painting and Romance in My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin, 2015) - Film Secession Exhibition Extract

In this extraordinary sequence from My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin, 2015), the young Paul Dédalus tries to explain the deeper meaning of a Hubert Robert painting in the Palais des Beaux-Arts of Lille to his girlfriend. He does so with an ingenuous mixture of pompous self-regard and precocious insight that evokes his literary prototype Stephen Dedalus (of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916, and Ulysses, 1922).

Lille is the regional capital of French Flanders and a short train ride away from Roubaix (Desplechin's home town). Desplechin was born in Roubaix, and he treats it the way Joyce treated Dublin: as a space of confinement, as a labyrinth, and as a rich site for imaginative transformation.

Paul Dédalus's humorous comparison with the mythic (and famously disastrous) encounter of Diana and Actaeon gives deeper meaning to Robert's Terrasse d'un palais à Rome (1776) and imbues the scene with a singular form of self-deprecating tenderness.

Learn More about the relationship between painting, literature, and cinema, French Flanders, Joyce, and Desplechin's intimate journeys in our Exhibition:

https://www.filmsecession.com/exhibition/arnaud-desplechin

#filmsecession #arnauddesplechin #flanders #hubertrobert #painting #filmart