The best years in the cinema: Elegy of the reunion

Claude Lelouch, sitting in a hotel room at the Park Monceau, he's wearing despite the heat, a sweater, and he's talking about Jean-Louis Trintignant, the main actor of his new film. "Jean-Louis has problems with walking and Hearing. Therefore, he puts all his strength in his voice. When he speaks, you believe him everything. This is not an actor, it's a mouth of truth. I have built my movie with this voice – and the face of Anouk Aimee, the most beautiful face in the world.“

Andreas Kilb

feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.

It is "The most beautiful years of life", the forty-eighth film from Lelouch, and the third, in which Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant together. Play two people who know each other from earlier, who have loved once, and after decades of good-bye. You are welcome Anne Gauthier and Jean-Louis Duroc, and thus it is not clear that "The best years..." is some age romance, but the continuation of a story.

"It was too beautiful, too perfect," she says

Because Gauthier and leroc reserved the main characters were called in "a man and a woman", the movie, the Lelouch in 1966, made famous. Also at that time they were embodied by Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant, and even then, the most important scenes played in Normandy, on the beach of Deauville, and in a nearby Hotel. The Film returns to a place that is simultaneously fictional and real, part of a story and part of the reality – as well as the actors are both actors in their roles, and the performers themselves.

The Film begins with two visual shocks. The first is the encounter with Anouk Aimée is. She speaks into the camera, she is eighty-eight years old, and she looks like in her mid-sixties. It has changed so little that it is assumed involuntarily, the Film itself was of older date. But no, this is 2020, and this is the woman that was sixty years ago in "La dolce vita" the mistress of Marcello Mastroianni before he fountain rose to Anita Ekberg in the Trevi. "It was too beautiful, too perfect," she says, and writes the love story that she experienced four years later, as Anne Gauthier with Duroc alias Trintignant, and perhaps the same is true for many of Anouk Aimées roles, but not for the woman she plays here.

He sits in the nursing home, she has Trintignant a Store

then, and Only then sees Jean-Louis. In Michael Haneke's "Happy End", his last Film, he sat in a wheelchair. Now he also has the facial expression and the Gestures of an old man, and I watching in a special way hurt, because Trintignant has presented in its almost seventy-year film career, all kinds of human characters, but never the loss of self-control. He will soon be ninety, but that is only a number; what do you mean, you see in his sight. "He was, and he didn't do it", will Anne say later about your re-encounter with Duroc, and: "At once I was of the two of us the man." Sharper, more accurate, more touching, you can not Express it.

The story goes like this, that Duroc is sitting in a nursing home and his son, Antoine worries to him. The Old man is going to abandon, just the thought of the great love of his life to keep him going. So Antoine goes to Madame Gauthier, who operates a shop in a village in the vicinity of a stuff: "you are his best memory." The mistress of once visited the Beloved, of her supremacy, that he does not recognize it ("the longer I talk to them, the more they resemble her"); he asks whether or not you die with him, and when she refuses, if she wants to run away with him.