Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #312: My Days of Glory (2019).

 

Adrien Palatine (Vincent Lacoste) is experiencing a quite unique quarter-life crisis. He's a former child movie star but as he approaches age 30, the role offers have dried up and he's becoming, frankly, a bit of an addict. When he's not drowning his sorrows at the local pub or smoking in the street, he's scrounging around looking for a chance at an on-screen comeback, and also for off-screen love. Prosperity briefly shines on him again when he talks his way into a part in a war movie, but his self-absorbed nature soon jeopardizes both that and his efforts to find and impress his dream girl.

The 2019 French romantic dramedy My Days of Glory is quite reminiscent of (500) Days of Summer, but only in narrative intentions. Where that gem of a sleeper hit explored 21st-century relationships with almost painfully honest accuracy and threw staccato visual and musical surprises into the pot for real vibrancy and fanciness, this (and, with it being French where that was an American film, surely you'd think it would be the more artsy one) deliberately takes the visually conventional route and subsequently feels increasingly bland and boring. I also found its attempts at humour too understated, and while director Antoine de Bary and his co-screenwriter Elias Beldekkar do include a couple of slightly racy scenes, I found them to be placed too late in the story for it to rejuvenate my interest. Lacoste, who I think is almost becoming the French Michael Cera with the kind of roles I've seen him in so far, tries his best to bring nuance and variety to both Adrien and the roles Adrien himself plays, but he carries the entire movie on his shoulders and that's a cross I think most actors would've struggled to bear.

Additionally, the dramatic elements become, I think, too heavy-handed and overall, as both a romance and a coming-of-age flick, I just don't think it has enough zest and imagination narratively, and certainly not aesthetically. My Days of Glory do not, for me, mark de Bary's. 5/10.