Everything That Is Suffocating About French Film, in One French Film

Arnaud Desplechin’s “My Golden Days,” which played at the New York Film Festival last fall and opened in regular run last Friday, is a terrible disappointment, the work of a filmmaker who’s not pushing himself at all. I’m astonished by the acclaim it’s receiving—and yet I’m not—because the movie’s particular defects match perfectly with some of the cinematic dogmas of the art-house class.