3/5
Review by John P. Harvey.
France’s answer to Back to the Future takes an unusual approach to time travel in shifting an entire culture forward in time but leaving intact its protagonists’ memories of their period of origin and ignorance of their new timescape, highlighting changes in attitude as much as changes in physical environment.
Living a typical Parisian suburban life in 1968, husband and wife Michel and Hélène Dupuis (Didier Bourdon and Elsa Zylberstein) live the dream. He is a banker, earning their income by knocking back loans for innovations his limited imagination cannot compass; she is a full-time housewife, taking care of everything else.
When Michel and Hélène discover that their daughter, Jeanne (Mathilde le Borgne), is pregnant to the son of their neighbours — Michel’s friend Jacques (Romain Cottard) and his wife Yvonne (Céline Fuhrer) — all four parents unite in determining that the parents-to-be will wed…
But Michel and Hélène are shocked to discover, the following morning, an overnight change: that they now occupy a different reality. In this reality, they have replaced their identical selves — who have identical family and neighbours — living in 2025, some 57 years in the future. In this reality, pregnancy is not the problem it was in 1968, and Jeanne is about to do something even more unthinkable: marry another woman. As well, Hélène goes to work in an office, where she is the boss.
Genuine fun arises in Michel’s and Hélène’s astonishment and horror at plenty of other changes. Their initial reactions to the technologies that their other selves evidently are at home with will remind some of us of our own more gradual exposure and offer insight to others of us as to how unnatural the world of 2025 would seem to anybody from 1968 (or earlier). And Michel’s attempts to return them to their lives of 1968 create great scope for comic mayhem.
With this fresh take on adapting to time travel, Cycle of Time is filmed with a good eye for the outlandishness of modern devices (though, strangely, not of style fashions, etiquette, or laws) so familiar to us that they’re all but invisible.
Screening at Palace cinemas.