What Time Is It There?

A chance encounter between a street vendor and a young woman traveling to Paris blossoms into an endearing examination of loneliness, mourning, and time’s passage, with room to spare for a tribute to François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and even a cameo by Jean-Pierre Léaud. Every life here seems lived at the wrong time, from the woman’s Parisian stumbles to the vendor’s quixotic battle to set all clocks to French time, or a grieving wife’s “date” with her dead husband. As deadpan as Buster Keaton, as existential as Samuel Beckett, it’s “a film of surprise and wonder, lyrically attuned to the ticking intensity of romance” (Rolling Stone).