‘Plus ca change plus c’est la même chose’ appears to the thesis of The Spanish Apartment director Cédric Klapisch almost aggressively pleasant new film. Colours of Time reaches between the 19th and 21st centuries, asserting that certain ideas about love, art, and grumbling about the pace of life nowadays, is universal. Unfortunately, it presents them as a dual timeline in a script that is consistently clumsy in its transitions and milquetoast in its execution.

In the present, four distant cousins are chosen from the living descendents of one Adèle Meunier (Suzanne Lindon), to act as notaries for her country cottage in Normandy, empty since her death in 1944. They discover photos of Adèle, and a painting on the wall, which appears to be Impressionist in style. As they investigate their ancestor, the story cuts to Adèle leaving for Paris to search for her mother, who left for the city when Adèle was one.

During her journey Adèle meets two young friends, photographer Lucien (Vassili Schneider) and painter Anatole (Paul Kircher). She panics on discovering her mother (Sara Giraudeau) works as a prostitute in one of those weirdly romanticised fin de siècle Parisian brothels, and falls into a comradely, shoestring Bohemian life with the friends. As time passes Adèle finds herself drawn into the artistic world and her experiences echo across time the deeper her descendents delve.

Klapisch and co-writer Santiago Amigorena‘s script is far more confortable immersed in the Belle Epoque. Their vision of Paris in 1895 just about manages to avoid coming across as overly picture postcard. There is a hint of concern that the path of aspiring model Adèle may turn out to be the one her mother walked earlier, yet for the most part she and her two friends breeze through life in Paris. Their’s is not some La bohème tragedy, but a trail of breadcrumbs to be followed 130 years later.

Far less engaging is the present-day strand. While a journey that unearths links to great luminaries of the period like photographer Félix Nadar and Claude Monet is a fairly charming whimsy, the mirroring ideas of art and technology don’t resonate quite so much. The conflict between commerce and art that content creator Seb (Abraham Wapler) agonizes over, for example, lacks the romance of the same quandary for the more charismatic Lucien and Anatole. More actively egregious is the poor writing in which the group take ayahuasca to ‘time travel’ and meet the Impressionists face to face. It aims for a magical realist Midnight in Paris feel, but comes across as a wholly unncecessary addition, more clumsy than charming.

Many will be charmed by Colours of Time. It unspools in an unhurried confluence of revelation and sentiment, like the most benign of detective stories. Klapisch isn’t overly concerned about pulling too hard at the more intellectual threads he sets up. This is an unabashed attempt at a crowd pleaser for better or worse, and he takes the more neatly picturesque decision at every turn, right down to a central Mama Mia!-esque quest to determine paternal identity that many will love but leans hard towards mawkish and ridiculous. Overly cozy and ultimately quite anodine, the colours here appear rather blanched.

Screened as part of the French Film Festival