Happiness was so possible – Newspaper Kommersant No. 48 (7493) of 03/22/2023

Olivier Trainer’s melodrama Le tourbillon de la vie (The Time Traveler) is released. The French director-debutant got his own version of the Oscar-winning film “Everything Everywhere and At Once”, only without jokes about sausage fingers and with a focus on difficult female happiness. Tells Yulia Shagelman.

In the year 2052, about eighty-year-old Julia Fineman (Lou de Laage) watches her little granddaughter play by the sea and reflects on her life. Like most of us, it consisted of accidents, large and small, perhaps not even immediately noticed, but from a distance of several decades, seeming important and decisive. At what point did life turn where it turned and bring you to the point where you are now? The one when you decided what you want to be when you grow up? Or when you won a prestigious professional competition, or when you met someone who seemed to be your only one? Or at the moment when, running away with classmates to Berlin for a couple of days to look at the demolition of the wall, I forgot my passport in the dorm room?

In 1989, seventeen-year-old Julia (the same Lou de Laage) is studying at a college in Amsterdam and is preparing to become a great pianist. This is the dream of her parents, especially her father, a piano maker (Gregory Gadebois), but the girl, in general, does not mind and diligently studies. News of the fall of the Berlin Wall excites the students, they decide to see the historical event with their own eyes, and a friend (Esther Garrel) even manages to persuade obedient quiet Julia to join this journey. However, at this point, the story of the main character bifurcates: one version of her is loaded onto a bus with the whole company, arranges an impromptu performance near the rubble of the wall, and ends up in the newspapers – much to the displeasure of her parents, who knew nothing about this little adventure. The second returns for a forgotten passport, catches the eye of the teacher and does not go anywhere. Now we are watching two Julias, then there will be even more. Everyone’s life will have professional and personal successes and failures, physical and psychological traumas, different men with their own personalities and relationships with different Julias, friends, parents, children – or their significant absence.

In its concept, The Time Traveler is similar to the 1997 romantic comedy Beware! Doors are closing”, where the whole fate of the heroine Gwyneth Paltrow was determined by the second when she managed – or missed – a certain subway train. Olivier Trainer, however, raises the stakes compared to his British counterpart Peter Howit, juggling not two, but four storylines (although, for example, he forgets about Julia in Berlin for a long time, returning her only in the last third of the two-hour film). You can also see distant parallels in the picture with the fashionable Oscar-winning “Everything Everywhere and At Once”, where it was also about the fact that each person simultaneously lives many lives in many parallel universes, and in any of them the main thing is who does it with you. But in “The Time Traveler” there are no elements of fantasy, except for the fact that in three of her four incarnations, Julia meets a worthy man who is ready to accept her for who she is. At the same time, by an amazing coincidence, the hard-won happiness of motherhood falls to her precisely in the plot where the man (Rafael Personas) turns out to be far from the image of a handsome prince or at least a decent partner.

On the whole, the story of every Julia, even the one who nevertheless became a famous pianist who gives concerts all over the world, is filled with the most ordinary events lived by the majority of adult spectators. So far, in the very finale, the director does not give up and decides for some reason to crown the picture with a symbolic and emotionally squeezed finale. He, of course, is presented as a reward to the heroine for everything she had to go through, but it seems that living up to eighty years of sound mind, a sober memory and surrounded by loving loved ones would be quite enough.