A warm, lightly comic family-reunion drama with a strong sense of place and art-history texture, but it leans on familiar inheritance-and-reconciliation beats. Best enjoyed as an amiable ensemble piece rather than a deeply surprising one.
Colours of Time
Where to watch: Buy
Movie · History · Drama
Thu · 2h 6m
Director: Cédric Klapisch
Starring: Suzanne Lindon, Abraham Wapler, Vincent Macaigne
Overview
When four distant cousins inherit a 19th-century home in Normandy, they decide to visit and examine their family history. No one has lived there since the 1940s, and the cousins are intrigued by all of the items they find there, little things that help them to understand their ancestor, Adèle Vermillard. Jumping back and forth in time, they meet the mysterious Adèle, whose bohemian lifestyle, and her relationships with the leading artists of the time, changes their lives.
Director
Cédric Klapisch
Cast
Suzanne Lindon, Abraham Wapler, Vincent Macaigne
Curator Review
Verdict
A warm, lightly comic family-reunion drama with a strong sense of place and art-history texture, but it leans on familiar inheritance-and-reconciliation beats. Best enjoyed as an amiable ensemble piece rather than a deeply surprising one.
Best for
Viewers who like generational family stories
Fans of French ensemble comedies-dramas
People drawn to art, memory, and place-based storytelling
Audiences in the mood for something gentle and reflective
Skip if
You want a tightly plotted film with high stakes
You prefer very original narrative structures
You are allergic to sentimental family reconciliation
You need a movie with a sharper comic edge
Overview
Colours of Time is the kind of film that treats family history like an archaeological dig: a house, a set of cousins, and a trail back through memory, inheritance, and old emotional damage. Cédric Klapisch keeps the tone light enough to move easily between comedy and melancholy, and the Normandy setting gives the story a pleasant, lived-in sense of geography and time.
Worth noting
The appeal is less in plot twists than in the pleasure of watching estranged relatives slowly become legible to one another. The film seems especially interested in how the past survives through objects, places, and artistic echoes, which gives it a more textured feel than a standard reunion dramedy.
Bottom line
It does, however, operate in familiar lanes: family secrets, romantic tangles, and the soft landing of mutual understanding. If you like Klapisch’s humane, ensemble-driven approach, that familiarity will feel comforting; if you need sharper dramatic conflict or a more daring structure, it may feel pleasantly modest instead of essential.
Top Letterboxd reviews
juflm (2.5★) · 1034 likes
imagine tu fais un film avec POMME et tu lui donnes un HOMME comme love interest et y a aussi JULIA PIATON et tu la fais sortir avec son COUSIN et tu donnes à CECILE DE FRANCE une relation ambigu avec son PROF DE LYCÉE
Alice (3.5★) · 989 likes
François civil était pas dispo du coup ils ont pris abraham wapler
maïoux🪩 (4.5★) · 870 likes
que quelqu'un ARRACHE l'affreuse moustache de Paul Kircher sinon j'en fait une affaire personnelle
A crowd-pleasing French ensemble piece with class consciousness, nostalgia, and affectionate humor.
Themes
family inheritance, estrangement and reconciliation, memory and legacy, art history, place and identity, generational conflict, romantic entanglements, self-discovery
Topics
French drama, ensemble comedy-drama, family saga, inheritance, art and memory, Normandy, generational reconciliation, lightly sentimental, coming-of-age-adjacent, contemporary European cinema