by Hudson Moura
Cédric Klapisch’s Colours of Time is an elegant, intergenerational tale that treats memory as both archive and encounter. The premise is deceptively simple: a dilapidated family home in Normandy is slated for demolition to make way for a shopping centre, compelling distant relatives to authorize the sale. What begins as a bureaucratic task becomes an archeology of images when the house yields letters, photographs, and an Impressionist canvas. These objects channel the film’s traffic between present and past, gradually disclosing the late-nineteenth-century story of Adèle (Suzanne Lindon)—who leaves for Paris in 1875 in search of her mother, Odette—and her entanglements with Anatole (a painter) and Lucien (a photographer). Along the way, the narrative brushes against figures like Félix Nadar (Fred Testot), Claude Monet (Olivier Gourmet), Victor Hugo (François Berléand) and Sarah Bernhardt (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), not to mythologize origins but to situate family history within a wider ecology of art, technology, and celebrity.
Klapisch structures the film as a double initiation: four contemporary family members learn who they are by learning what their ancestors became. The editing—oscillating between centuries without fetishizing period décor—gives the film a rhythm of recollection rather than flashback, as if each discovered object were a hinge opening to an unfinished present. The most incisive articulation of the film’s project arrives in the opening sequence: a fashion shoot staged before a Monet. When a top model/social media influencer complains that her dress clashes with the painting and proposes altering the painting’s colours in post-production, her assistants nod with algorithmic pragmatism. The gag is genuinely funny, but its critical point is clear: in an era of frictionless image-modification, what remains of the stubborn materiality of art—and of memory?
This question anchors the film’s most convincing character arc, that of Seb (Abraham Wapler, who also plays a young Claude Monet), a photographer whose day job producing social content has trained him to prioritize surface over relation. As the house’s archives pull him into the tactile histories of plates, pigments, and paper, his practice reorients from optimization to attention. Klapisch stages Seb’s transformation with lightness—never punitive, never nostalgic—suggesting that technological fluency need not foreclose ethical seeing. By contrast, Adèle’s trajectory in the nineteenth-century strand is less fully realized. The film gestures toward her transformation but often keeps her as a relay for encounters (artist, photographer, stage luminary) rather than a subject whose choices precipitate the drama. The result slightly blunts the mirror-play between centuries; had Adèle’s agency been as sharply drawn as Seb’s, the film’s dialectic of past and present might have landed with greater force.
Formally, Colours of Time is assured. Klapisch’s blocking is clean, the cross-temporal transitions are motivated by tactile details (a glance aligns with a portrait, a letter completes an eyeline), and the young ensemble is uniformly appealing. The film’s pleasures are real: a spry script, beautifully staged set-pieces, and a precise sense of how spaces—houses, studios, salons—store affects. If the finale feels more harmonious than revelatory, it is because the film ultimately prefers reconciliation to rupture. That choice is defensible: Colours of Time argues that looking backward can be an ethical act in the present, provided we resist the impulse to retouch history to fit our palette. 
Rating: 4/5
The film will be screened at Cinéfranco: Francophone International Film Festival 