‘Colours of Time’: Life as art – Play It Again, Tim

You finish a great novel — Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education,” maybe, or Tolstoy’s “War and Piece.” 

You walk through the Musee D’Orsay or the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and take in the French Impressionist paintings.

You listen to Dubussy’s “Clair de Lune” … or Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love” … or the Who’s “The Rock” … or Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

These experiences can be staggering. They can capture the power, the enormity, the beauty and heartbreak and richness and depth of life. They can knock the breath out of you.

Movies, of course, can have the same impact. Most don’t. But then that rare, magnificent film comes along that moves you to the core, leaving you enriched and grateful for having experienced it — and for being alive.

French writer-director Cedric Klapisch’s “Colours of Time” (125 minutes) is such a film. It’s about so many things: the relationship of past and present, the importance of family and art, innocence and experience, personal choices, love and sex, nature and progress, concepts of wealth … so much more. Klapisch manages to interweave all of this naturally as part of a sublime, subtle narrative linking two eras.

You can catch his must-see film at the 21st annual Martha’s Vineyard International Film Festival, running Sept. 8-13 at Martha’s Vineyard Film Center in Vineyard Haven. “Colours of Time” will screen at noon Sunday, Sept. 13. Not on the island? Take a ferry. It will be worth it.

Suzanne Lindon in “Colours of Time.” (Courtesy of Martha’s Vineyard International Film Festival)

“Colours of Time” goes back and forth between 1895 and now. In the present, 30 living descendants of Adele Meunier learn that they have inherited Adele’s country home in Normandy and all of its contents. Four members of this extended family — Guy (Vincent Macaigne), Seb (Abraham Wapler), Celine (Julia Piaton) and Abdelkrim (Zinedine Soualem) — are chosen to travel from Paris to Normandy to check out the home, deserted since 1944. Developers have offered to buy the place in order to expand a shopping center and build a large parking lot. (Holy Joni Mitchell, Batman!).

The four — strangers until now — break into the abandoned house, which is covered with vegetation, opening the door into their ancestor’s past, complete with family photos, artwork from unknown sources, letters and so forth.

While they dig into the past, so does the film, cutting to scenes of Adele (Suzanne Lindon) at age 21 in 1895, when, after her grandmother’s death, she leaves her home and boyfriend to go to Paris to find the mother that she hasn’t seen since she was an infant. There she befriends best pals Anatole (Paul Kircher), an artist, and Lucien (Vassili Schneider), a photographer; uncovers secrets about her mother (Sara Giraudeau), and experiences the excitement of late 19th-century Paris.

Klapisch gives equal weight to both periods and their characters with music ranging from sublime orchestral compositions to pulsating electronica, and exquisite cinematography that sometimes seems right out of a Degas or a Monet painting. In fact, both artists appear with fellow impressionists Renoir, Berthe Morisot and others in one sequence, with Monet playing a larger role in the film.

“Colours of Time” deals with artistic masterpieces of the past, including how they weren’t necessarily appreciated by many when they were first introduced to the public. But it goes much further, as it depicts life as an ongoing masterpiece (it’s up to you, dear reader, to decide who the artist might be).

One message, among many, comes from Adele’s mother, when she tells her daughter: “Take what life offers,. Make mistakes. … Better to regret what you’ve done than what you haven’t. **** (out of four)