Ekphrasis

(De)constructing Nostalgia: Ageing, Life Review and Artificial Stagings of the Past in Contemporary French Cinema

Adrien VALGALIER

Abstract:

This article aims to challenge reductive assumptions about ageing and nostalgia by examining how contemporary French cinema represents later life through the framework of the life review, focusing in particular on Guy (Alex Lutz, 2018) and La Belle Époque (Nicolas Bedos, 2019). Rather than assuming that nostalgia naturally intensifies with age, the study argues that nostalgia emerges from a specific experience of temporal distance and change. Drawing on theoretical contributions from philosophy, cultural gerontology, and nostalgia studies, the article situates nostalgia within the broader framework of the life review, understood as a dynamic and interpretive process of revisiting one’s past in the ageing individual.
The analysis shows that these films reject simplistic narratives of decline or idealized longing for a lost past. Instead, they stage the past through deliberately artificial dispositifs (mock documentaries, studio reconstructions, reenactments, and simulated fake archives) that foreground critical distance with the past. Nostalgia functions as a process of redefinition.
Both Guy and La Belle Époque initially present ageing protagonists as outdated or in decline, yet progressively complicate these caricatures by challenging cultural disdain, age norms, and assumptions about old age. Through music, performance, and narratives of ambiguous fatherhood, ageing is ultimately reframed as a moment of self-examination. The life review is thus portrayed less as a final synthesis of existence than as an ongoing reshaping of selfhood, in which past and present remain unstable and open. Ageing is depicted as a moment of questioning, regeneration, and renewed capacity for transmission rather than closure.
The study is limited to two case studies within contemporary French cinema and does not claim generalizability. However, it opens avenues for future research on mediated memory and the performativity of age across broader cinematic and cultural contexts.

Keywords: Nostalgia; Ageing; Life Review; Old Age; French Cinema; Artificial; Past

DOI: 10.24193/ekphrasis.34.6