Text / Liu Ying

The French, who are so romantic in their bones, always tirelessly explore the word “love” in film and television works, and “a day’s trip to a good dream” is no exception. In this sad, romantic and humorous film, director and screenwriter Nicholas bedos shows us the process of emotion from germination to flowering, and then to fading and withering. The seemingly light comedy shell is wrapped with many helpless and even heartbreaking moments. From seemingly harmless jokes to serious discussion on the essence of marriage, a good dream day tour provides a creative model of emotional films with both commercial and artistic nature.

Victor, the protagonist of the story, is a cartoonist. He has a son with his wife Marian when he is old enough. His son has long lived independently and his career is quite successful. However, as time went on, the estrangement between victor and his wife became more and more obvious: after 25 years of company, there was no principled disagreement, but life diluted passion, that’s all. Marian wanted to be separated, and Victor was unable to return, so he had to move bitterly away from their common home. At this time, an invitation from his son became his emotional life-saving straw - a role-playing company committed to reconstructing good memories, which can meet the customized needs of customers and let them immerse themselves in the life they want to experience. Victor hopes to return to the Lyon pub where he met Marian and rejuvenate his old heart.

Antoine, the boss of the role-playing company, is a reader of Victor, whose comics once brought great excitement to him as a teenager. In order to express his gratitude, he invited Margo, his confidant and excellent actor, to play Marian in his youth. So, in a carefully arranged role-playing play to review history, Victor picked up bits and pieces of memory. In the soft light that can be controlled at will on the set, he fell in love again: either with Margo or with her Marianne. At the same time, the constantly emerging memories bring complex emotions to Marian, who is determined to pursue personal happiness. She is struggling between old love and new love. She has experienced a brief emotional weightlessness… In contrast to the old couple, it is the entanglement between Margo and Antoine, the young people. The game between them can be regarded as a mirror image of Marian and Victor to some extent. They are each other’s past and present lives. In the dopamine whirlpool in and out of the play, each of them examines their own emotional ties with each other in order to make a choice that really follows their hearts.

The brilliance of this film in screenwriting is that it does not develop in order, but completes the comparison and description of the past and today through the jump between different time points. The role-playing scene is like a play in a play, which provides the possibility for the characters to shuttle freely between memory and the present. The fake drama in the simulated drama space also sets up a charming stage for the emotional development and entanglement of the two groups of characters. Through editing, the multiple clues of the script are further intertwined. The love you love and I wish is not clear in one sentence or two. The overlap and disorder of time and space aggravate the sense of continuous reasoning and confusion, and bring infinite interpretation possibilities to the audience.

When Margo, who plays the role of young Marian, appeared in front of Victor and Antoine at the same time, the four people’s irrelevant emotions had an unprecedented entanglement in an instant - the elderly couple could regain their love after spending most of their lives with each other, and the young lovers could prolong their emotions as much as possible in the consumption of falling in love and killing each other? Or, the shelf life of a relationship is not important. It may be the best result for two people to meet and fall in love in a specific scene, a specific crowd, or even in a specific light. In Marianne’s words, living together for 25 years can be regarded as a small achievement. It’s better to revisit the old dream on the set or turn the tide by taking advantage of time travel. In a good dream day tour, emotion is not only an oath, but also a game. Probably no one can see this more clearly than the French.