Manuel reporting from the New York Film Festival with an improbable prequel among this year’s selection.

No one does brooding romantic despair like the French. Arnaud Desplechin’s My Golden Days, a pseudo-prequel to his 1996 My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument so revels in it that you could just as easily title it “The Sorrows of Young Esther.” And while yes, that title would be aping a German novel, Desplechin’s Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet) merits being name-checked alongside the most famous romantically bereaved character in all of literary history, and not only because Goethe’s novel, like Desplechin’s film, depends on the epistolary form.

Esther, who falls for Paul Dédalus (Quentin Dolmaire playing the younger version of Mathieu Amalric’s character from Desplechin’s earlier film), spends most of the time daring the camera to turn away from her sorrows, her tears, her despair, all of which she channels into the letter she sends Paul while he’s off at university in Paris. She cannot bear being away from him. Cannot bear her life without him.

Can you blame her? Dolmaire is beautiful!