Cycle of Time

There is a question no existentialist has ever had the nerve to ask with sufficient irony: what if time were not everyone's problem, but each person's own? Vinciane Millereau, a Belgian-French director with a nose for comedies that make you laugh and then leave an uncomfortable sediment behind, poses it in the most effective way possible: by hurling a nineteen-fifties family into the middle of 2025 with no regard whatsoever for their nervous systems.

Era meglio domani — a title that is itself a temporal oxymoron worthy of Borges — works as the negative mirror image of Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998), that underrated masterpiece that sent two contemporary teenagers into the glossy abyss of American black-and-white television. Ross dispatched his protagonists backwards, into the idealised and suffocating past of the fifties, and watched as colour — understood as a metaphor for authenticity, desire, critical consciousness — slowly broke through the grey of collective obedience. Millereau performs the opposite movement, and for this reason her film is, in a certain sense, even more merciless: whatever you call the journey, the outcome is always the same — some people are saved, and some stand watching the train pull away.

Elsa Zylberstein inhabits Hélène with a grace that transforms before our eyes from accommodating domestic submission into an almost childlike, upturned astonishment at a world that — incredibly — seems to have been built for her too. Hers is an involuntary rebirth: no one had asked whether she wanted rights, and yet there they are, waiting for her like a parcel held at the post office. The character's arc is the true narrative spine of the film: it is not the story of someone who wins something, but of someone who finds something she did not know she had lost — or rather, had never had at all.

Didier Bourdon, for his part, delivers one of the most comically devastating performances the genre demands: Michel is not a villain, and that is precisely his aesthetic sentence. He is a man who genuinely believes he is in the right, that he occupies the place that is his by right, that he exercises a power he calmly mistakes for the natural order of things. 2025 does not punish him — it simply removes the backdrop. And without a backdrop, the protagonist becomes an extra in his own story. Kafkaesquely, his greatest terror is not the future itself, but the fact that the future has stopped needing him — except for things he considers beneath a man's station.

Here lies the structural difference from Pleasantville, and the most interesting contribution this film makes — more radically — to the reflection on the genre: in Ross's film, the past was a place to be liberated, an aesthetically flawless prison but one without pathos. In Era meglio domani, the future is not a destination but a mirror. What it reveals is not progress itself — with all its smartphones, its cancel culture, its negotiable pronouns, its avocado toast, and its cucumber juices — but the pitiless contrast between those who already had everything and have lost it, and those who had nothing and have found, at last, a room with their name on the door.

The film is not without its naivety. Some of the culture-shock gags stay on the surface — whereas in Pleasantville everything goes deep — and certain comic mechanisms choose the path of the easy laugh over the riskier, more rewarding one of reflective unease. But when it works — and it works often — it does so because Millereau does not judge any of her characters: she observes them, lets them err, lets them discover. And this non-condemning gaze at an era and its ghosts is, in the end, the most civilly honest thing a film on these subjects could allow itself.

It is not irreverent to draw a comparison to Maccio Capotonda's grotesque and delirious television series Sconfort Zone, which investigates whether genuine reinvention is possible and whether radical change means "killing" one's previous self — where the terror is not the future but the prospect of ceasing to be who one has always been.

Era meglio domani is not Pleasantville, and it probably has no wish to be. It is something smaller and more direct: a popular comedy with declared ambitions it does not always fulfil. And yet — and this is its genuine merit — it asks the right question: for whom was yesterday better? And it leaves the audience with the not-trivial task of answering in silence.

A journey into the future that serves above all to understand the past. And those who lived inside it.