A Distant Neighborhood
In search of lost time
However happy had been one’s adolescence, everyone has something that he or she wished had been different, some mistake made gone, some bad event, or even something regretful not having done. What if there was a chance to go back in time and redo things? This is the premise of this interesting French film, “A Distant Neighborhood” (“Quartier lointain”, FRA, 2010), by filmmaker Sam Garbarski.
Thomas Verniaz (Pascal Greggory) lives a difficult time in his life. In his fifties, he is married, has two daughters, a comfortable life and makes a living with something he loves, the drawing of graphic novels, comic books for collectors. Even with these accomplishments, Thomas feels unhappy.
He feels distant from his family, thinks that they do not miss him, even with the frequent absences for the promotions of his works. Even the professional side is affected, because in two years has failed to create anything new, although fans love his characters, especially the heroines of adventure stories. Thomas is restless, he would like to do something different, more intimate and emotional.
On the return of a trip, he is awakened by the train conductor. When examining his passage, the man warns him that he is on the wrong train, and advises him to get off at the next station, to take the correct train to Paris.
When Thomas descends on the station, he takes a shock. By chance of fate, he was at the station of the small town in which he had grown up, and whose last visit had been many years before, for the burial of his mother.
As the next train would take a few hours, he decides to pay a visit to his mother’s grave. On the way, he meets one of his childhood friends, who accompanies him to his old home. Thomas doesn’t recognize almost anything, everything is changed.
Upon arriving at the cemetery, disturbed by the strong heat and emotion, Thomas feels ill and faints. When he wakes up, he realizes something is weird. When he gets up, he discovers that he had returned to being a teenager, although he kept the memory of his whole life.
Ecstatic, he returns to the house in which he had lived, and discovers that everything is as he remembered. Even his father (Jonathan Zaccai), who had abandoned them without a trace on his birthday, is still there, as well as his mother and younger sister.
The young Thomas (Léo Legrand) is delighted with this return in time, and imagines that the reason is to modify the most painful event of their lives, the disappearance of his father. He reencounters his old companions, relives teen games, but begins to face them differently, as well as the relationship with his mother and younger sister.
While worrying about his father’s behavior, Thomas finds the girl he was in love with, and whom he had never dared to approach. Your drawing skills make she interests in him.
At the same time that Thomas becomes inebriated by this return to adolescence, he realizes that his father was an absentee, and that this behavior was perhaps due to the way he met his mother (Alexandra Maria Lara), who was the fiancée of his best friend, who died in World War II.
Thomas learns that his father received calls and often visited a woman, who imagined a mistress, the possible cause of his departure from home. But as his investigations deepened, he realizes that, in fact, she was one of the things that maintained his father in that town.
Thomas is distressed to realize that nothing he does can change his destiny, and begins to feel trapped in that boy’s body, not knowing what will happen next.
When he is forced to confront reality, it is that he begins to understand the true reason for his return to the past, forever leaving being a boy.
The story of “A Distant Neighborhood” follows with remarkable fidelity the manga (the Japanese comic book) “Harukanaru machi e”, authored by Jirô Taniguchi, about a Japanese executive who finds himself projected in the past by stopping by accident in the small town where he had lived. The screenplay was magnificently adapted by Philippe Blasband, Jérôme Tonnerre and director Sam Garsbarki.
Like every good French film – and with a good hint of oriental vision – “A Distant Neighborhood” is not to be seen with a literal look. Rather than being regarded as a science fiction story, Thomas’s time travel seems to be more of a dip in his own soul, penetrating into the depths of his most painful memories, to understand who he himself is.
There are small details in the film that suggest or induce a suspicion about who the film actually speaks of. Some of Thomas’ gestures and habits are identical to his father’s, but this could be normal in a father-son relationship. Is the story about Thomas’ father, or about himself?
The last seconds of the movie are very revealing about everything that has been shown before, but nothing is openly explained as in Hollywood movies. “A Distant Neighborhood” follows the French tradition of open endings, which give way to long and pleasant discussions among cinephiles.
This movie can be watched on the Amazon Prime Video streaming service.