La belle année

Revisiting a teenage crush on a teacher, Angelica Ruffier embarks on a delicate journey of memory and desire. A finely woven, reflective essay on past longings and present selves infused with the subtle glamour of French cinema.

One wonders whether Angelica Ruffier ever truly forgot the French high school teacher on whom she nursed a teenage crush, if not something closer to love. Nothing ever happened beyond her one-way longing, yet it left behind a few tangible traces she rediscovered many years later. These finds became the starting point for her très Lelouch’ian-titled documentary-essay on memory and desire, La belle année, for which she sets out to find the object of her adolescent fascination, older now, distant, and still subtly lingering.

Should we return to the loves from different stages of our lives? Should we confront people with needs we felt decades ago? And what good would it do now, for do we really want to be with these people in the present? Countless questions arise from Ruffier’s voyage, whose outward movements mirror the changes happening within.

Sensitive and finely woven like a cobweb, yet touched with the glamour of French cinema’s 1970s heroines, La belle année becomes a meditation on far more than one person’s past, present and imagined future. Its emotional terrain is one in which many viewers may recognise themselves.

– Vanja Kaludjercic

• 

• 

•