a SIFF 2010 review
Bleak Children a Saga of Despair
Film producer Grégoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) is the chairman of the Paris based Moon Films. With a talent for finding fresh new voices that challenge the medium he is a legendary figure in the French film community, and even if his projects don’t always find immediate success their lasting impact upon the art of cinema almost goes without saying.
Alice Gautier, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing and Manelle Driss in Father of My Children © IFC Films
But things are especially bad right now. Moon Films is on the verge of bankruptcy, and even though on the surface Canvel continues to portray the visage of a loving husband and father underneath this passionate man of the arts is anything but. He’s feeling positively suicidal, and if either his wife Sylvia (Chiara Caselli) or his trusted assistant Valérie (Sandrine Dumas) realized the extent of his depression they’d have cause for real worry.
Based in part on the life and times of the late French producer Humbert Balsan (Lars von Trier’s Manderlay, James Ivory’s Jefferson in Paris), I’m not entirely sure what to make of filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve’s (All is Forgiven) latest effort Father of My Children (Le Père De Mes Enfants). Beautifully made and exquisitely acted the film is nonetheless a head-scratching curiosity, and by the time it faded to black I wasn’t quite sure what the point of it all was in the first place.
This is a hard movie to go into in very much detail as my goal is to not ruin any of its surprises for those who choose to seek it out for a look. All I can really say is that what at first appears to be a character-driven morality play of a hardworking father trying to balance his failing business with his loving family instead proves to be anything but, a mid-narrative twist forcing things into an entirely different direction altogether.
What I will say is that Caselli is spectacular. Forced to take over the central narrative around the midpoint, she doesn’t just rise to the occasion she pole vaults right over the top of it. This is a complex performance filled with subtle nuance, the way she balances the questioning tear-filled eyes of her children with the hard-boiled economic realities of Moon Films despair all quite stunning. Her scenes with Lencquesaing have depth and charm, I could really feel the love passing between them, while a moment with her eldest daughter Clémence (Alice de Lencquesaing) managed to hit me with the weight of a thousand hammers.
All that said Father of My Children left me cold and perplexed. The focus keeps shifting between Grégoire, Sylvia and Clémence, all of them going in differing directions looking for answers that are frustratingly out of reach. As a look at the devastating effects of depression the movie is too sudden and shocking to let that impact play out as fully as it should. As an examination of the lasting artistic merits of a failed man the movie doesn’t give enough insight into Grégoire’s cinematic catalog to let us know whether they have any value or not. It’s all a big hodgepodge of ideas mixed with heartbreaking tragedy, finding the rhyme and reason of it all as difficult as getting seeds out of a grapefruit without squirting juice into your eyes doing it.
Mulling it over a part of me thinks my reaction is exactly the one Hansen-Løve is going for. There is no rhyme to tragedy. There is no reason behind death. Things happen and people do their best to move on, all of us trying to find a bright side to give us cause to smile even when the horror of a particularly bleak situation can feel overwhelming.
Not that I’m sure if my interpretation is even close to being correct. The simple truth here is that Father of My Children left me wondering what the heck I had just sat through and witnessed. While I appreciated the fact that Hansen-Løve refused to spell things out or give her audience easy answers I’d still have liked to have felt something other than hopeless despair by the time it was over. This is a grim family drama that I can’t quite put my finger on, and as well as it is made and acted I can’t imagine I’ll be watching it again anytime soon.
Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)
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