The Current French Cinema (2) - Tom Ryan reviews JEAN VALJEAN (Éric Besnard, 2025) and COLOURS OF TIME (Cedric Klapisch, 2024)

If 2026’s local offerings – via the French Film Festival and general release (current and forthcoming) – are any indication, the cinema of France is in good health. An earlier post by Tom reviewing two other new French films, The Richest Woman in the World (Thierry Klifa, 2025) and The Stranger (François Ozon, 2025), can be found IF YOU CLICK HERE

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Éric Besnard

Jean Valjean (2025, Éric Besnard, 99 minutes, currently screening)

Writer-director Éric Besnard’s affecting and stylistically bold Jean Valjean is probably best described as a prequel to the numerous adaptations of Les Misérables that have variously graced or plagued the world’s screens and stages over the best part of a century. Drawing on only the first two books of Victor Hugo’s famous novel (1), it begins soon after its title character (played by Bernard regular Grégory Gadebois) has been released from prison after serving a lengthy sentence.  

From the first time we see him, it’s as if he’s been cursed by his existence, a lumbering, threatening bear of a man merging into the light from a horrible nightmare and still in a state of shock. When he arrives after dark in the small town of Digne, in the south of France, nobody wants to have anything to do with him. Until he finds himself at the local bishop’s presbytery door. 

Grégory Gadebois as Jean Valjean

Although his housekeeper (Alexandra Lamy) is immediately distrustful and hostile, the bishop (Bernard Campan) welcomes the social outcast as a fellow traveller who’s stumbled on to the wrong side of the tracks and is in danger. Meanwhile, the bishop’s ailing sister (Isabelle Carré) looks on with a mixture of admiration for her brother’s fearless generosity and concern for what might follow. 

Largely unfolding in the house’s shadowy interiors, the visual gloom evocatively relieved only by flickering candlelight, Jean Valjean is beautifully shot in CinemaScope by veteran cinematographer Laurent Dailland. Honouring its source, the film’s style is realist in spirit if not in style, Besnard’s account of a lost soul on the road to recovery persuasively portraying the bishop’s capacity for compassion as a force capable of saving the human race from itself.

(1)    Part of the inspiration for the character of Les Misérables’ protagonist Jean Valjean was the life of Eugène François Vidocq (1775 – 1857). A rogue and former convict who ended up on the other side of the law running a detective agency, Vidocq was part of Victor Hugo’s social circle. He died five years before the author’s famous novel first appeared in 1862. 

But long before then, in 1829, with the help of some writer friends, he’d published his (heavily romanticised) memoirs, which, like Les Misérables, have inspired several screen and stage adaptations. They include A Scandal in Paris (1945), directed by Douglas Sirk, who described it to interviewer Stephen Harvey in 1978 as “my best film”, and starring George Sanders as the consummate gentleman con artist. 

Cedric Klapisch

La venue de l’avenir / Colours of Time (2024, Cedric Klapisch, 126 minutes, opens July 23)

This is another of Cedric Klapisch’s accomplished films about people from different backgrounds being thrown together by circumstance and becoming partners in an adventure that guides them towards a new understanding of how the world works and their places in it. This time, though, it’s more like a fairytale that sweeps us into a realm where the past sweetly kisses the present, those who just don’t get it are readily sidelined, and the dreamers deservedly triumph in the end.

The set-up is straightforward, intertwining two amiably sentimental coming-of-age journeys. One, set in the present day, takes four cousins from Paris to Normandy to unshutter the home of an ancestor in anticipation of the place being torn down to make room for a shopping-mall car park. The other, set in the 1890s, the era of la Belle Époque that gave rise to Impressionism, takes that ancestor, Adèle (Suzanne Lindon), from Normandy to Paris in search of her mother. 

The cousins have only just learned of each other’s existence and have little in common. But a genial meet-and-greet during their train trip quickly breaks the ice. To all-round amusement, Seb (Abraham Wapler) explains that he creates “digital content”; Celine (Julia Piaton) is an engineer in the transport industry, forever on her mobile; Abdel (Zinedine Soualem, a Klapisch regular) is a French middle-school teacher; and Guy (Vincent Macaigne) is a beekeeper and union activist. And soon after they step inside their destination, a veritable museum of their ancestry, they find that they’re of a like mind about what’s to be done with Adèle’s cottage. 

Odette (Sara Giraudeau), Adele (Suzanne Lindon)

Whereas they travel by train, the countryside zipping past virtually unnoticed through the window alongside them, Adèle undertakes her journey first by horse and carriage and then by riverboat along the Seine, immersed in the glorious countryside of Van Gogh and Renoir flowers and riverside greenery. En route, she meets two young men from Le Havre, Lucien (Vassili Schneider), a photographer, and Anatole (Paul Kircher), a painter, with whom she hesitantly but quickly bonds.

A genuine sense of wonder accompanies the cousins’ dawning recognition of the secrets Adèle’s belongings hold to where they’ve come from and who they are. As their investigations and imaginations lead them across the threshold between now and then – in one scene literally and amusingly, under the influence of the hallucinogenic ayahuasca – the past comes alive for them, highlighting its connections and differences.  

And the film’s time-shifts do likewise for us as the characters walk the same streets and landscapes, cross the same bridges, ponder the same sights and visit the same places. Just as the singer Seb films in the present day (Claire Pommet) muses musically by the Seine about how Paris is filled with “the murmurs of other lives”, a friend of Lucien’s (Angèle Garnier) in the 1890s atop a Montmartre stairway waxes excitedly about the electrified nocturnal glow of L’avenue de l’opera as “the avenue of the future”.

 

Klapisch clearly had a lot of fun planning and executing all of this, working with longtime co-writer Santiago Amigorena and providing his now-regular cinematographer Alexis Kavyrchine with plenty of scope to make use of his painterly eye. The end result (whose original French title translates as “The Arrival of the Future”) is utterly irresistible.