Mes jours de gloire - My Days of Glory 

Directed by Antoine de Bary

Cast: Vincent Lacoste, Emmanuelle Devos, Christopher Lambert, Noée Abita, Damien Chapelle, Marc Fraize, Antoine Poulet, Jochen Handel, Pierre Maillard, Thomas Blumenthal

Country: France

Year: 2019

Author review: Roberto Matteucci

Click Here for Italian Version

“Does his moustache remind someone else?”

The work of the psychoanalyst has an inexhaustible mine of neuroses. In every moment of life, from every gesture, passion, disappointment, both positive and negative, the psychoanalyst can produce perpetual therapy sessions at infinite income.

Nevertheless, which is the most profitable?

Sigmund Freud has identified one of the greatest profits:

“If a practising psychoanalyst asks himself what disorder he is most often called upon to remedy, he is obliged to reply – apart from anxiety in all its many form – psychical impotence.” (1)

Impotence is the most widespread neurosis, and incredibly the age of patients is very low.

Literature teaches us. Octave, the character of Armance, the novel by Stendhal, is young and in good health.

In Il bell’Antonio by Vitaliano Brancati, the protagonist is a strong Sicilian man.

Why do young people suffer from impotence?

Sigmund Freud outlined the essential principle: 

“Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love.” (1)

Everything starts within the family. The “'affection' of parents” (1) increases the child's impulses and pushing during puberty to undertake the “powerful 'sensual'” (1) that collides with the barrier of incest.

Psychic impotence: 

“The sensual feeling that has remained active seeks only objects evoking no reminder of the incestuous persons forbidden to it …” (1) 

and if people have in the ego-drives those childhood situations: 

“… the impression made by someone who seems deserving of high estimation leads, not to a sensual excitation, but to feelings of tenderness which remain erotically ineffectual. “(1)

The French director Antoine de Bary follows, openly, this Freudian thought, in the film Mes jours de gloire - My Days of Glory presented at the 76th Venice Film Festival.

Adrian was a successful child actor. Now, he is 27 years old, but he does not want to get out of his adolescence. He, obsessively, but not seriously, looks for some roles in cinema, but his fails are persistent. He finally finds a part in a film about Charles De Gaulle, he has to act the President: "De Gaulle has always fascinated me."

However, it is inept and inadequate to play. He loses his role, evicted from home, he meets a horny girl, but Adrian cannot have sex.

The parents are separated, the mother is a Freudian psychoanalyst.

Adrian is inefficient to face life, does not understand the events around him, so he attempts suicide, and he is admitted to a clinic. It seems like a dramatic story, but it is not. Because Adrian is awkward, funny, lazy, ignorant, listless, immature, incompetent in love affairs. Above all, he faces existence with a shadow in his brain, therefore he looks extravagant and wacky.

In his mind, levity does not exist. The world is too heavy for him, and everything is against his expectations. However, the result would have been the same even if he had been successful in his professional and amateur actions. Something blocks him, makes him neurotic, nervous. His impotence is not the cause, it is the effect of discomfort born long time ago.

The author examines several popular topics.

The first is virility:

“Is this a film about manhood?
It asks a question about what it means to be a man today. We have all grown up with the image of the man who needs to be strong and powerful, and if he has a problem, he has to fight and be physical, and that is not the image of a man that I have.” (2)

Pornography, erotic clichés recognize wrong values in sexuality, as carnal power, size, easy and ephemeral relationships. For a young man not to have an erection is a depressive failure and makes him feel an outcast.

So, he tries to lengthen his adolescence, tries not to become an adult, until he crashes to an inner sorrow, prelude of suicide.

Antoine de Bary adds another reason. Early popularity - in film, television, sports - is temporary and short. He uses Christopher Lambert, as Adrian's father:

“Then it's a super-strong echo of Adrian's character. Lambert is less well known today – maybe young people don't know him, but for my parents, he was the biggest actor in the world. So, it’s a parallel to the story of Adrian, who used to be famous but can now walk down the street without being hassled.” (2)

Adrian's characterization appears in the initial sequence.

In front of a building in Paris, there is a firetruck. Adrian talks to a fireman. He called them because he smelled gas. It is not true. It is a childish lie. When no one sees him, Adrian quickly goes up the fire ladder to arrive before them. It was a shameless falsity, he forgot the keys inside the apartment, and he just thought this puerile trick could remedy his mistake.

There are many pleasant scenes with an identical style.

Adrian is so apathetic, he takes off his socks with his feet.

He participates in a birthday party, creating exclusively disasters.

He has just bizarre and weird friends.

Adrian is with the girl, alone in a Cab of a roller-coaster. He is embarrassed, silent, he does not have any topic to chat.

The problem is different. If a person sleeps with Freud's picture over the bed, how much chance will they have not become neurotic? He will not have any hope. In fact, Adrian has no future. It is not difficult to understand who put the photo on his bed. The Freudian mother treats him like an idiot, as if he were a patient and communicates with him coldly. Only, in the end, the son leans his head, affectionately, on her shoulder.

The plot is based on clear psychological themes. The film proceeds linearly but formal and logical.

The other element is a parody. Adrian is a caricature, as a cartoon character, both for his grimaces and for his clumsy postures. As if it were a cartoon, misfortunes have a comic background. It is a comedy. An Italian comedy, the director confirms.

“Why did you want to make a comedy? 
For me, the big inspiration for the film were the Italian comedies of the 1960s. What’s impressive about them is that the tone of a comedy is overlaid on a dramatic story. For me, humour makes a movie more playful. I get along better with a film if it tries to make me laugh a little bit because I think it's more big-hearted.” (2)

“Humour makes a movie more playful”: so, the doctor examining Adrian for his erectile dysfunction, he wants to see his penis, and asks: "Let me see the worm".

Poor Adrian!

1 Sigmund Freud, The Psychology of Love, Penguin Book, 2006

2 https://cineuropa.org/en/interview/377912/#cm