Paris (AFP)

For his second film, "The Belle Epoque", in theaters Wednesday, Nicolas Bedos is once again interested in love, with a cast of French stars including Daniel Auteuil in the role of a disenchanted and nostalgic man.

"Before, at the table, we spoke without a phone, there was the left, the right," launches Victor, a former cartoonist disillusioned, embodied by Daniel Auteuil.

In "La Belle epoque", presented out of competition at the last Cannes Film Festival, second feature film by director and comedian Nicolas Bedos after "Monsieur and Madame Adelman", this one fondly plays with the pain of Victor, sexagenarian allergic to new technologies.

He regrets the lightness of the 70s when his wife, Marianne, incarnated by Fanny Ardant entered the twenty-first century, escaping through a virtual reality headset and alongside a world where we speak "e- conviviality "and detox cure. He struggles to find his place in this modern society whose stakes escape him and in which everything has a price.

While the couple is torn apart, Antoine, played by Guillaume Canet, a brilliant entrepreneur, will propose to Victor, by a mixture of theatrical artifices and historical reconstruction, to plunge back into the era of his choice.

He will thus relive the most memorable week of his life: the one where, 40 years earlier, he met Marianne, incarnated in his youth by Doria Tillier.

"The film does not apologize for the + it was better before + It notes the nostalgia of an era and at the same time amuses", had defended in Cannes in a press conference Nicolas Bedos. The character of Victor "will draw from a past a little more gratifying (...) the energy that will allow him to adhere" to the world today, he insists.

"This trip back in time is also what he needs to realize what he likes in the present. (...) This shows that the love can be different according to the times, but that 'is not necessarily better before,' said Guillaume Canet.

With this film, Nicolas Bedos, who has become known as a humorist thanks to his sharp pen, offers his characters tasty games, where the tones blend blithely passing from melancholy to cynicism. A tender and funny comedy novel, long applauded during its screening in Cannes.

© 2019 AFP