Colours of Time

A content creator, a disruptor, a beekeeper and a teacher walk into a bar. Sounds like the set-up for the most 21st century gag – and in a roundabout way, it is. The punchline, as spun in Cédric Klapisch’s (The Spanish Apartment, Call My Agent!) amiable time-leaping comedy, is that these four people are cousins. Their family tree has sent its branches shooting off in the maddest directions. Like Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, we’re off time-travelling to a more colourful era in French history to understand their common dominator: a young Norman woman, Adèle Vermillard (a wide-eyed Suzanne Lindon), who sets off to find her own mother in Belle Époque Paris and ends up intersecting with the Impressionist masters.

The four distant relatives have been appointed by their wider family to help decide what to do with their great-great-grandmothers’ broken-down Normandy cottage. A supermarket chain wants to buy the land and they must decide what to do with her legacy of art and portraits – in the process learning about her and themselves. (Entertainingly, the wider family gathers on a conference call in which an older relative has a kitten filter on – an unexpected homage to the Zoom Cat Lawyer meme, perhaps.)

It’s a great excuse to revisit this gilded age in French history

Klapisch is a French director who treats his characters with the care of a Frank Capra, and Colours of Time is as accessible and generous as any of his work – a family dramedy with the sprightly spirit of a romcom. His characters embrace each others’ differences and spark new connections as they travel between Normandy and Paris, and slowly realise they have a Monet on their hands. 

Darting between 1895 and 2025, he introduces a tapestry of real-life characters – Claude Monet, photographer Félix Nadar, actress Sarah Bernhardt – as Adèle finds herself at the epicentre of Parisian high society and, via an unlikely ayahuasca trip, her modern-day descendents even join her. 

Clever cuts between the two timelines lend a nice unpredictability to the yarn. Newcomer Abraham Wapler as video artist Seb and Zinedine Soualem’s high-school teacher Abdel are standouts in the likeable ensemble, but the Adèle timeline, a sepia-tinged coming-of-age tale with a backdrop of characters to put Madame Tussauds to shame, is the film’s heartbeat. It’s a great excuse to revisit this gilded age in French history.  

In UK and Ireland cinemas now.