“Klapisch encourages the audience (particularly Gen Z) to think about their own relationship to history and art, and to put down their phones and explore the world around them.”

Thirty years into a career filled with crowd pleasers that have charmed French audiences, Cédric Klapisch comes to Cannes for the first time with La venue de l’avenir (Colours of Time), one of his most ambitious films. Primarily taking place across two time periods, 1895 and 2024, the film follows the adventures of a provincial woman exploring Paris on the brink of the Belle Époque and her descendants more than a century later. As four strangers – eccentric beekeeper Guy (Vincent Macaigne), uptight engineer Céline (Julia Piaton), fastidious French teacher Abdel (Zinedine Soualem), and aimless content creator Seb (Abraham Wapler) – are brought together to handle cataloguing the estate of a distant relative, the film also follows provincial farm girl Adèle (Suzanne Lindon) as she journeys to Paris in a quest to find her mother at a moment when the city is a force of artistic evolution.

As with many of Klapisch’s films, this is a light confection that happily employs clichéd imagery of Paris past and present as a source of inspiration for people in search of something more in their lives. Much as Adèle matures during her time in Paris, spending time with his newfound family gives Seb a greater sense of self. However, the two storylines aren’t equally effective. While the film’s 1895 plotline is more playful, incorporating historical figures such as Sarah Bernhardt and Félix Nadar as figures who pop up as Adèle explores the City of Light, it suffers from a lack of stakes: Adèle quickly finds her mother (Sara Giraudeau, bringing surprising emotion to her stock role) and just as quickly forgives her for being a sex worker, and her chaste quasi-romance with aspiring artist Anatole (Paul Kircher) is nothing but a playful distraction, as she ultimately remains faithful to a barely seen farmer back home. All the while, her adventures in Paris are surprisingly weightless. Much of this can be blamed on superficial writing, but Suzanne Lindon is underwhelming in her first starring role since her 2020 directorial debut Spring Blossom – while her performance is more effective in the second half of the film as Adèle gains self-confidence, she doesn’t entirely convey the energy and charisma that draws people to Adèle throughout her time in Paris. This strand of the film is charming enough, but lightweight even by Klapisch’s standards.

The 2024 strand of the film, while suffering from a first hour of underdeveloped characters and clichéd musings of how everyone is too obsessed with their smartphones and viral fame today, is ultimately more impactful as more weight is given to Seb’s dissatisfaction with his life. Having lost his parents as a child, he struggles to connect with others and find a truly satisfying outlet for his passion for filmmaking. But in connecting with his distant relatives and exploring Adèle’s country home filled with clues about her life, he finds a sort of family that he didn’t know he needed. Newcomer Abraham Wapler is very impressive in his first major role, imbuing Seb with an unexpected melancholy that gives his increasing engagement with his family heritage some much-needed dramatic heft. The other members of the family aren’t given as much to do, with Julia Piaton sadly saddled with a thinly written role that is little more than a harried career woman with romance woes and Vincent Macaigne once again recycling his eccentric, neurotic schlub schtick that has become a constant presence in the recent work of Olivier Assayas and Emmanuel Mouret. Longtime Klapisch regular Zinedine Soualem, often showing up in small roles in the director’s films, makes the biggest impression of the family. His obsession with grammatical correctness is an amusing running gag, and conveys the exhaustion of a dedicated teacher who has been ground down by an education system stretched to the breaking point, but without forgoing a warm chemistry with his screen partners. And French singer Pomme has a lovely musical interlude as Fleur, a potential love interest for Seb, although their relationship is but one tiny piece of the film’s puzzle.

This section of the film continues Adèle’s surprising connections with iconic figures of French history, as a painting discovered by Abdel uncovers a link between her and legendary Impressionist painter Claude Monet, which the quartet unravel with the assistance of art historian and Abdel’s former student Calixte (Cécile de France). This turns the modern-day strand of the film into a low-key detective story, as they try to guess how Adèle was connected to such a major figure of French art, culminating in an amusing sequence in which the group take ayahuasca and travel to the past, allowing Klapisch to indulge in some of the trippy filmmaking techniques that were a hallmark of his early films (frantic editing, an electro score), while mining much humor from the group interacting with 19^th century figures, the highlight being Céline flirting with Victor Hugo (François Berléand). It is also a more cynical look at European globalization than Klapisch’s beloved L’auberge espagnole (2002), as the inciting incident that brings Seb, Abdel, Céline, and Guy together is organizing the sale of Adèle’s family home to a European conglomerate that will use the land to create a mall parking lot. Through exploring French history and culture, the family is brought together and new bonds are formed, underscoring the importance of heritage and cultural preservation over profit.

While not quite reaching its full potential and suffering from an unequal balance in quality between the two time periods that the film covers, Colours of Time is an enjoyable tale of self-discovery in the big city and a playful homage to France’s rich artistic heritage. As Adèle and Seb embark on their intertwined journeys, Klapisch encourages the audience (particularly Gen Z) to think about their own relationship to history and art, and to put down their phones and explore the world around them. They may find unexpected beauty and surprising friendships.