The Golden Age

Jeanne defies the conventions of her time. She pursues love from Paris to Brazil and back again. An epic saga spanning decades, filled with grand emotions and images.

In the French countryside at the beginning of the 20th century, Jeanne Lavaur grows up as a butcher’s daughter. When she meets the young Guillaume de Barante, she falls in love and becomes pregnant. The aristocrat, however, reacts differently than she had hoped. To escape her shame, Jeanne leaves home and moves to the capital. From one war to the next, from Paris to Brazil, torn between husband and lover, she goes on to lead a life as dazzling as it is extraordinary – and entirely on her own terms. But at what cost?

Director Bérenger Thouin conceived a unique way of telling this magnificently acted epic. Working over ten years, he has woven original and archival material together so seamlessly that we can barely tell where history ends and fiction begins. And so his electrifiying debut results all the more moving.

Director