Here is a madly overegged, over-sugared pudding of a film by the French writer-director Nicolas Bedos. It’s comedy-drama that is not funny enough to count as a comedy and not plausible enough to count as a drama. You’re going to need a very sweet tooth for it – sweeter than the one I have.

Daniel Auteuil plays Victor, who is very depressed – a state that Auteuil knows well how to project. Victor is a once-famous children’s book illustrator and graphic novelist, now fallen on hard times and disenchanted with his life and with his stagnant marriage to psychotherapist Marianne (Fanny Ardant). She is having an affair with François (Denis Podalydès), the newspaper editor who fired Victor from his job as a cartoonist. But Victor has a possible saviour – a fan of his work called Antoine (Guillaume Canet) who makes a good living devising immersive theatrical experiences, private Truman Show-style rides for plutocrats who fancy going back to the late 19th century, or maybe a belle époque in their own youth.

With the help of a huge set and dozens of extras with cigarettes, sideburns, flares etc, Antoine places Victor in the 1974 Lyon bar where he first met his wife. Antoine’s own estranged wife, Margot (Doria Tillier), is to play young Marianne. Will this dizzying imposture revitalise either man’s marriage? Or will Victor simply fall in love with Margot?

There is something of Charlie Kaufman or Michel Gondry in this high concept, or perhaps even Hirokazu Kore-eda’s cult fantasy After Life – though La Belle Époque is frantically strained and, frankly, not as funny as any of them. Worryingly, it almost looks as if Bedos has watched these films and decided he can sell something blander and easier to a mainstream audience.

• La Belle Époque is in UK cinemas on 22 November.

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