Film Review: Changing Times (2004)

Lately I’ve grown tired of romantic comedies, or even romantic dramas. Same characters, different names. Same locations (New York in autumn, Los Angeles when it rains, a sleepy Southern town with eccentric extras and lots of golden light and overdrawn accents). Same dialogue.

Changing Times (French title: Les temps qui changent) is a love story but effortlessly avoids the tired cliché of the genre. Perhaps it’s Catherine Deneuve‘s heavy, expressive eyes, or Gerard Depardieu’s quiet (almost creepy) desperation. They’ve been separated for thirty years, for reasons unknown to us in the beginning. Cecile (Deneuve) lives a quiet life in Tangiers with her handsome, much younger Moroccan husband Natan (Gilbert Melki), a doctor keen to escape their fading existence and move to Casablanca, where he can earn twice the salary and probably have his pick of twice the women. Antoine (Depardieu), her once-proudly destitute former lover, is now a wealthy construction executive who’s spent the last three decades pining for her, never marrying, always plotting how they can cross paths once again. When an opportunity to oversee the construction of a broadcasting station in Tangiers opens up, he seizes his chance and makes his way to the sunny Mediterranean city. When he’s not exhorting his employees to work harder in order to make their tight deadline, he’s stalking his old flame.

Deneuve has never looked lovelier in this film; she’s beautifully photographed, the soft curves of her delicate face belying that depth of emotion and mystery for which she’s well known. I’ve only ever seen her twice before, in Belle de Jour and Indochine. In each of those films, she gives her legendary impression of the iconic French ice queen, cold and angular, sexy but distant. Even when seducing the young Vincent Perez in Indochine, she seems brittle, her veiled eyes almost resigned with disappointment.

Here, the lush Moroccan seascape seems to awaken her melancholy. She’s aware of Natan’s infidelities and appears to accept it as an inevitable consequence of marrying a younger man, but you get the sense that she’s waiting for something – anything – to jolt her out of her misery and create a spark of renewed energy and hope in her life. You just can’t believe that this strong-willed, disciplined woman would ever succumb to such an ordinary fate, and when the moment finally arrives in which she meets Antoine for the first time since they separated thirty years before, the viewer’s experience is almost visceral. No matter how weird Antoine may come across in his clumsy attempts to woo his old love, you have to hand it to the man: he and Cecile really do share a chemistry that’s lost none of its power over the years. And when he asks, “Can your first love be your last,” you almost want to believe that the answer – for these two, anyway – is Yes.

These are people overwhelmed with secrets: Does Cecile still love Antoine? Is there any love left between Natan and Cecile? Just who is this Bilal with whom Natan and Cecile’s son, Sami, is so involved? Who is Nadia, and what happened between her and Cecile that would make her so reluctant to even see the woman? To whom does Nadia’s son, Said, belong? What is her relationship with Sami? For that matter, what happened between her and Aichad, her twin sister? And will Antoine and Cecile finally reunite? Should they?

Although it’s not especially long at about 105 minutes, the film takes its sweet time unfolding all the disparate stories. It doesn’t, however, attempt to resolve them all. Indeed, even the final scene holds some uncertainty, for while a voiceover by Cecile reveals bits and pieces of the fate of each of the characters, the narration is incomplete, leaving suspended in the viewer’s mind the question of what really happened to everyone, or even to Antoine. Most still harbor the secrets they clung to at the opening of the film, although Cecile herself appears transformed by the events, even allowing herself a moment of happiness in the final shot. Deneuve is the rare actress who can convey a lifetime of emotion with a mere flicker of her eye, and in this thoughtful story of a lost love revisited, she has never been better.

For his part, Depardieu skirts the line between ardor and neediness and does so in his usual, all-or-nothing manner. In the hands of a lesser actor, Antoine might have come across as being a caricature, a pathetic old man more annoying than romantic in his awkward, almost sinister attempts to regain Cecile’s attention. But Depardieu succeeds in his portrayal of a love-starved, professionally successful man for whom control over everything around him is a given – except when it comes to the woman he’s always loved and has never forgotten. Will he finally win Cecile’s heart once again and really “steal” her away from Natan? You’ll have to find out for yourself. Theirs is a story worth watching.

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