Daniel Auteuil plays an illustrator in his sixties who has lost his mojo along with his joie de vivre and is on the verge of losing his wife too. Then his son persuades him to fork out for a role-playing exercise run by a company that recreates any point in the past that the client desires in painstaking detail, with period sets and actors. So he starts reliving the moment in 1974 when he first met his wife, and soon can't distinguish fact from fiction, seduced by forced recollections of all that he'd lost over the years.
Soon, neither can the viewer, and herein lies both the charm and vexatiousness of the film. We're moving in Kaufman/Gondry country, where magical realism serves as the medium for drawing us into a fresh view of the world we take for granted when it works, and sojourns in cloud cuckoo land when it doesn't. Overall, it just about manages to tread the right side of the line between the two, but don't go expecting to take away great personal insights.
6/10
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