Customer Reviews

Les Temps Qui Changent (Original French Version - with English Subtitles)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The trailer for this film by French director André Téchiné gives the impression that it's a story of rekindled romance between two people who were once young lovers. This is true in only the strictest sense of the word, as the obsessive and undying infatuation of one of them (Depardieu) is met for most of the film by the unsentimental reluctance of the other (Deneuve) to feel much of anything but annoyance with almost everyone in her life - including her husband, her son, and her son's girlfriend.

The larger theme of the story is the lack of real emotional connection holding any two people together. The son carries on a purely sexual relationship with an old boyfriend, while his girlfriend tries unsuccessfully to reunite with a twin sister she has not seen in many years. Deneuve's character and her husband are separating as he takes a job in another city. Meanwhile, their son's girlfriend has a drug addiction and is indifferent to his professed affection for her. In the background is the cultural divide that lies between secular Europe and Muslim North Africa.

Words fly fast and furious in many scenes as characters express anger and frustration with each other. For non-French speakers, this is a drawback, as the film's setting in Tangiers offers much for the eye and the ear that speed-reading subtitles causes the viewer to miss. Deneuve, of course, is worth seeing in anything, and while her character here is not altogether sympathetic, her presence and the way emotions register on her face are fascinating. Depardieu, for his part, looks lumpish and a bit implausible as a lovelorn man of certain years, especially as he takes a bruising tumble after walking into a glass partition.

Writer/director André Téchiné (Wild Reeds, My Favorite Season, Child of the Night, etc) is able to take what appear to be simple emotional responses from complicated people and create an artwork that makes us think, become introspective, and be challenged and entertained all at the same time. His ability to draw intensely personal performances from his actors makes him a director with a full heart and startling technique.

Essentially a love story, 'Les Temps qui changent' ('Changing Times') examines the lives of two people who fell in love in Paris 30 years ago, but parted. Antoine Lavau (Gérard Depardieu) has never married, so in love with his original flame Cécile (Catherine Deneuve) that he is obsessed with winning her back. Cécile has married a younger man, Natan (Gilbert Melki) who is a philandering physician, and lives in Tangiers where she hosts a dowdy talk show on the radio to help support the family. The couple has a bisexual son Sami (Malik Zidi), who has returned to Tangiers with his drug-addled girlfriend Nadia (Lubna Azabal) and her son Saďd (Idir Elomri) much to his parent's concern, and takes up with his Moroccan lover Bilal (Nadem Rachati). The family problems are further complicated by the fact that the Morroccan Nadia has a twin sister Aďcha (also played by Lubna Azabal) in Tangiers who is trying desperately to separate her life from her twin.

Antoine, an architect of means, manages to land a job in Tangiers in hopes of rekindling his romance with Cécile, but Cécile has become a feminist and a bitter woman who resents her younger husband's infidelity and wants nothing to do with love, especially with the threat of depth of feeling that Antoine's new presence in her world presents. Antoine is persistent, meets Cécile's husband for medical reasons, and tries to woo Cécile in a close to stalking manner. Cécile's best friend Rachel (Tanya Lopert) convinces her that the only way to end the ardor of Antoine is to sleep with him, which she finally does with unexpected results. While the dance between Cécile and Antoine progresses, Natan meets Aďcha, Sami and Bilal arouse old emotions, and Nadia requires rehab for her out of control drug habits. How all of these coincidental occurrences coincide in an unexpected accident for Antoine is André Téchiné's magical way of sharing the power of love in the most adverse of circumstances. The ending is surprising and thought-provoking and eminently satisfying.

Depardieu and Deneuve are luminous in their roles, adding yet other crowns to their careers of creating unforgettable, subtle characterizations on film. The remainder of the cast is also superb and the cinematography and music and editing and direction make this a feast for the eyes and the brain. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, October 06

Apparently in André Téchiné's Changing Times Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve are together again after appearing in The Last Metro all those years ago. Surely though, they could have picked better material than this to appear in.

This strangely turgid and dramatically static drama is set in Morocco and features some great views of Tangier, and tries to probe the cultural gulf between the French ex-pats who live there and the Muslims, but the film comes across more as a vehicle for a reunion between two great French acting legends than anything else.

Depardieu plays Antoine, a successful construction supervisor who is in Tangier, to oversee a new housing project, but his reasons for being there are not exclusively professional. Antoine as it turns out still holds a flame for Cecile (Deneuve), the first and only great love of Antoine's life.

It's been more than 30 years since they split up, but Antoine, who never married, has apparently never stopped thinking about her for a single minute of a single day. So whilst Antoine seems determined to live the bachelor life, Cecile's life is so complex that she seems unendingly short-tempered.

Cecile is the host of a successful local radio show, is married to Nathan, a Moroccan doctor (Gilbert Melki), and has a grown son named Sami (Malik Zidi), who makes his home in Paris but has returned to Tangier with his own issues. Sami has bought Nadia, (Lubna Azabal.) to Tangier with her son, but he is equally interested in rekindling a relationship with a local Moroccan boy Bilal (Idir Rachati). Nadia, in turn, has a problematic relationship with a more traditional twin sister named Aicha she hasn't seen in six years.

The whole proceedings verge on tawdry soap opera and although these characters are richly textured and undeniably sympathetic, the under-written screenplay doesn't really give them much to do. There's very little plot and even less drama, so the whole film comes across as desultory at best. And in a totally silly turn of events, Antoine attempts to persuade Cecile to fall in love with him by consulting Nabila (Nabila Baraka), seeking a voodoo spell that would awaken Cecile's love for Antoine.

Though Téchiné doesn't deal with it in a ham-fisted way, his film is also interested in exploring what it is like to live in a city where cultures crash, Tangier is obviously a city where McDonald's and traditional sorcery both do a thriving business practically side by side and where illegal immigrants camp out in the coast, waiting for an opportunity to travel to Spain.

Changing Times feels like three separate movies all plied into one. Sami who is trying to balance his relationship with Nadia and Bilal feels like it comes from a totally separate film and Nadia's efforts to see her twin sister also feels like a sort of add-on.

Also, Deneuve and Depardieu don't have a lot of chemistry together; consequently, you never get the feeling that this is supposed to be the timeless love and devotion. As it stands Changing Times is a rather spotted and ramshackle film that tries to explore the themes of eternal passion but comes across as rather shallow and unsophisticated. Mike Leonard October 06.

This film ponders the question: How do you know when it's true love? André Téchiné (1943) is known for his emotionally-charged films that explore the complexities of what it means to be human. Anyone who has seen his film Rendez-vous knows his characters behave in mysterious and unpredictable ways, often motivated solely by the ways of the heart. Set in Morocco, with a soundtrack featuring Beninese singer-songwriter Angélique Kidjo, Téchiné's Changing Times (Les temps qui changent) (2004) is a French love story. Gérard Depardieu plays Antoine, a middle-aged civil engineer, who has been counting the days since he last saw Cécile (Catherine Deneuve) thirty years ago. Cécile is now living in Tangiers, and has been married for twenty years to a Moroccan physician, Nathan (Gilbert Melki). At first, Antoine considers using witchcraft to win her back, but he is an engineer, after all, not a witch doctor. So he begins anonymously sending her roses everyday at the radio station where she works. When they eventually meet in a supermarket, at first Cécile wants nothing to do with Antoine, telling him their love is over, and that her life as a wife, mother, and broadcaster is complicated enough. Because Antoine is living in the past, he is unable to see the compelling woman Cécile has become. However, Cécile decides to have a fling with Antoine(or a "stop over," as she calls it), perhaps in an attempt to convice Antoine their love really is over, or perhaps to convince herself their love is a thing of the past. When Antoine suffers a serious accident on his new construction project, sending him to the hospital in a coma, Cécile scarcely leaves his bedside. She is visually moved when he regains consciousness. This film will appeal to romantics, except for those romantics expecting a typical Hollywood ending.

G. Merritt

Changing Times is in many ways a very unique take on traditional themes of love and drama. Gerard Depardieu is as stoic and effective as always, and Catherine Deneuve is used well if not to her fullest potential. And while we do not get to see how they were with each other in their younger lives, the film centers on them reuniting later in life through the effort of Depardieu. All of this is set to the backdrop of Tunisia in Northern Africa. Though the characters have each been changed by the different paths they have chosen in life, they are in some critical ways unchanged by their surroundings or time.

The one thing that is so amazing about this film is the way that the filmmaker mixes traditional sequences with artistic expressions of each character's point of view. It is subtle, but it adds a technical element to a very satisfying film.

The Story and the Script

Depardieu's character is an architect who has taken a project in northern Africa to be closer to his long lost love, Deneuve. Deneuve is since married to an Arab doctor and struggles to keep her distance from her old flame. While the premise is simple, the emotional depth of the writing and portrayals adds reality and a unique perspective to the story.

Added to the complexities of the romantic relationship are the various inter-relationships with children, friends, relatives and others. The dynamic of French norms against the backdrop of Tunisia also adds some strong story elements and imagery.

The screenwriting seems to have been characterized by quick yet short bursts of mostly casual dialogue. So much of the power of the film is what is communicated non-verbally. The plot of the story seems logically followed and effective.

Obviously the spoken language of the movie is French, and the dialogue is delivered in a quick and clean style. The only real negative that can be pointed out are subtitles that are often oversimplified and do not relay the full depth and meaning of several conversations. This is one foreign film where speaking at least a little bit of the native tongue goes a long way towards appreciating the movie.

The conclusions of the various plot elements is a mixed bag of both predictable and surprising results. What matters most is that it does come across as genuine and believable. Yet the resolutions of the various sub-plots aren't all handled cleanly and some story elements seem like they needn't have been included in context with the ending. Perhaps that was done intentionally. The actors once again make up for it with subtle and strong portrayals.

Conclusion

This film is truly an achievement for all involved. Lovers of French cinema need to see this if they haven't already. The nature of the story is that of longing and the test of time, and as a result there are some slow moving parts. While this is not for the action junkie, the pacing does support the story and is in keeping with the theme. Well worth owning and watching, particularly for fans of Depardieu.

Definitely watch this movie soon.

Enjoy!

In this tale of lost love, director Andre Techine offers us the stuff of life in an uncomplicated, yet provocative presentation. I happen to be a huge fan of Techine's because he always manages to turn the every day minutiae of human relating into fascinating stories that we are compelled to watch. In this case we are asked to wonder if it's possible for two people who have loved and gone their separate ways to still feel or rekindle that love many years later.

Antoine (Gerard Depardieu) and Cecile (Catherine Deneuve) were lovers 30 years ago and had gone their separate ways. All those years Antoine maintained his love for Cecile, but Cecile went on with her life marrying twice, and is currently living in Tangier with her husband of 20 years. Antoine, having loved her so deeply, has been looking for her all those years. Yet at the same time, he's been afraid that if they met, she would reject him, and that would be too painful. Finally he gets up the nerve and finagles a job in Tangier, giving him an excuse to meet her.

Cecile rejects him at every turn, even hurting him deeply to get her point across that she doesn't love him nor does she want anything to do with him, and he finally gives up. True to the cat and mouse game of human love sometimes, it's at that point she decides the only way she will really get rid of him is to see if something is there, and she goes to him. But can it work out?

I'm not really a fan of Depardieu, however, I admit he steals the show as he renders a truly heartbreaking portrayal of a man who's so in deeply love and who's completely lost without the object of his love by his side, whether or not it is all in his head or true love. You really feel for this guy even though frankly, he borders on edge of some intensely obsessive stalkerdom. However, Techine and Depardieu manage to completely keep him not only out of the realm of creepy, but well within the range of acceptable behavior.

Deneuve and Depardieu have worked together in several movies and even though their characters are in conflict, there is a certain real comfortableness in the way they interact with each other, and one can believe that their characters shared a history together.

As in other Techine movies, the secondary characters and story lines are just as interesting to watch as the main one. The relationship of Cecile and her husband is on the verge of cracking as each have reached a point of not caring enough to sacrifice anything for the other. Cecile's husband is compelling in that he really tries to appease Cecile, yet he can never be enough, and goes to others for diversion. Cecile's son is gay and loves a Tangierian man whom he was friends with while growing up there, however, he also loves a Tangierian woman drug addict with a son and chooses to live with her in Paris.

While all of this could play out as a sorted soap opera, it's neither over dramatic nor sentimental; it's a beautiful touching film done in a very simple and poignant manner.

I got through this with great difficulty because it is BORING! Bigtime boring. The plot is trite and there several detours that I didn't find relevant to anything at all. Waste of time, but I like Gerard and thought it might get better. It didn't.

There were places that just ate up time. For instance, machinery working or the one I didn't like at all was the time spent on killing the goat. Yet it's okay. Catherine and Gerard were excellent.

French film directors -- forgive me for generalizing! -- seem to have an unquenchable thirst for dramas of obscure passion and contorted relationships, 'romantic comedies' that are anything but comic. The best of such films are delightfully whimsical as they flirt with despair and betrayal. The worst of them bog down in simple melodrama or clog their scripts with implications of more profundity than they deliver. "Changing Times" is neither among the best nor the worst. It's a well-made film that goes nowhere ... well acted on the whole and creatively filmed but not very engaging.

The exception to the 'well acted' tag is the performance of Gerard Depardieu as Antoine, a successful engineer who has rekindled an obsession with his "first love" Cecile after thirty years and who comes to Morocco to recapture .... what? her of course, but also his own emotional wholeness. Unfortunately, Depardieu is the most over-used actor in the business and thus has exhausted his credibility in any role except the role of himself. Alas, he was superb in his prime, even though he was always too recognizable really to cloak himself in a character. His best role ever was Cyrano. Now he's become lumpish, luggish, and sluggish. Possibly an 'actor' instead of a 'star' might have brought this script to life ...

... but the marketing ploy of "Changing Times" was obviously the reuniting of Depardieu with Catherine Deneuve (Cecile), whose on-screen romances had been compelling decades ago. It's interesting, in a modest way, to behold them as aging and fading lovers; Deneuve reveals herself as a mummification of beauty in a way that suits the script and the mood of the film. But that cinema-history fascination is scarcely enough to compel an audience's attention for 100 minutes, so naturally there are sub-plots, sub-romances, that should offer sub-tleties but don't. Ceciles's husband is a repulsive narcissist, acted very convincingly by Gilbert Melki. Their son is a repulsive bi-sexual narcissist, absorbed in his identity crisis as half French and half Moroccan. His male lover in Morocco and his female lover in Paris seem both to understand his shallow commitment to anyone but himself better than he does, yet they allow him to gratify his selfishness with painful passivity. The female lover is a Moroccan whose twin sister rejects her -- wisely, one would say -- but who is herself drug-addicted and emotionally unavailable to her son. And the twin sister eventually runs off with the husband. How operatic! How French! The secondary characters are all excellent in their roles, perhaps because they are 'unknown' as stars.

And there's the setting: Tangiers, Morocco. Frankly, not much of the place is revealed, aside from a scene that shows a sullen throng of Sub-Saharan Africans waiting on the cliffs outside the city for any desperate opportunity to cross the straits to Europe. Why bother with such dabs of sociology if nothing is meant by them? I've been to Tangiers; this film avoided any evocation of the mood of the place as I remember it.

Bottom line? Watch it if it's offered on an Air France flight, but don't bother to rent it.

It was nice to Catherine and Gerard acting together. They have tremendous chemistry. The film proves that not all love is lost over the years. It was a touching film of re-discovering love. Andre Techine is a master of showing the world the simple details of life.