If the musical genre held latent sway on previous Akerman films like Toute une Nuit and One Day Pina Asked…, it is fully embraced in Golden Eighties, the director’s first truly commercially viable feature. Starring Delphine Seyrig alongside a handful of female co-stars as shopkeepers and retail workers in the Toison D’Or mall, the film offers a burst of collective girlish energy almost as buoyant and unrestrained as in a Jacques Demy picture, though Akerman is sure to pepper her ensemble narrative with intimations of past trauma (the Holocaust lingers in characters’ backstories) and contemporary economic anxieties. The men in the story are either remote or, in the case of Jeanne’s past lover who materializes in the mall after a decade of postwar estrangement, filled with empty promises—all the better to focus attention on the jubilantly choreographed song-and-dance bits, which play like budget versions of Busby Berkeley numbers recorded by an especially exacting camera. Meanwhile, the transparently chintzy shopping mall itself, initially a space of glittering promise, gradually becomes as impersonal as a train station in Les Rendez-vous d’Anna.