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“The Golden Hour” is a determinedly artful and novelistic memoir, recalling the ebb and flow of millions in Hollywood in the past half-century, not to account for winners and losers but to better understand his parents’ psyches, and his own.

Told in an elliptical style with novelistic chapters, the story follows Agnes, a literature grad student turned junior professor at a small liberal arts college who is struggling to move forward from a traumatic event.

Delaporte and De La Patellière understand that Dumas’ type of novelistic revenge, whether froid or chaud, is best served onscreen in the most picturesque European locations, with cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc’s cameras ready to swoop and soar as needed, and paced to gallop, never dawdle.

He uses novelistic touches to tell the story — snippets of dialogue here or a participant's ostensible thoughts there — gleaned from his interviews with the key players, which give the book a humanistic feel instead of a dry historical stuffiness.

If Macron’s narrative has undeniable operatic or novelistic qualities, the collapse of Olaf Scholz’s always-awkward coalition government in Germany, a few weeks earlier, barely rises to sitcom level.