Father of My Children
Le père de mes enfants
Mia Hansen-Løve (2009)
This is the third French drama I’ve seen in recent years which has a real hook but then works itself out evasively and conventionally. In François Ozon’s Time To Leave (Le temps qui reste, 2005), the terminally ill protagonist was at first notable for his self-centredness – a quality the young man didn’t seem to rise above but which Ozon increasingly overlooked as death approached. Philippe Claudel’s I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, 2008) was the story of a woman who’d been in prison for murdering her son and of how she coped in the world she was released into – but hardly anyone other than the audience learned her secret. Now there’s Father of My Children, the third film directed by Mia Hansen-Løve (who is only twenty-nine) and winner of the Special Jury Prize in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ section at Cannes last year. Grégoire Canvel, a film producer, beset by financial crises but whose family adore him and who seems to adore them back, commits suicide. ‘Why did he do this?’ asks his perfect, loving wife Sylvia. Having voiced the question, she shows no signs of pursuing it either in her own mind or in what she chooses to do after her husband’s death. The nature of that death seems shockingly thoughtless – Grégoire stood on a Paris street and put a bullet through his brain – and, you might think, traumatising for those he’s left behind. For all the difference it’s made to his family by the end of the film, the stress of imminent bankruptcy might just as well have brought on a fatal heart attack.
Father of My Children is better than the Ozon and Claudel films: for as long as Grégoire is in the picture, it’s absorbing and unnerving – and he is the nearly continuous dramatic focus right up to the moment that he kills himself. The film begins with a montage of short sequences showing him always on the move and always on his mobile – leaving the office, crossing the street, behind the wheel of his car in a traffic jam, speeding home on the motorway. It’s an obvious way of establishing his high-pressure professional life but it’s effective in building a momentum which, until Grégoire disappears, Hansen-Løve never loses. Whereas Colin Firth in A Single Man wears his suicidal intentions on his tailored suit sleeve, Louis-Do De Lencquesaing as Grégoire keeps things inside. You can believe, as you can’t believe in A Single Man, that no one would perceive his desperation. Once we see Grégoire reaching the end of his tether, we realise that his earlier tenacious affability must have had a desperate edge that we didn’t register at the time. As his financial position gets more impossible, De Lencquesaing expresses Grégoire’s apprehension of defeat with great skill: towards the end, he seems to keep walking only through an act of diminishing will. Hansen-Løve gets an ominous pressure into even Grégoire’s apparently relaxed moments with his family – when the kids are putting on a little play at home or the family goes swimming, during a short break in Italy. Grégoire and Sylvia’s three daughters are sparky but willowy. Pascal Auffray photographs their milky limberness in a way that makes the children touchingly vulnerable.
Father of My Children is confidently and fluently directed yet Mia Hansen-Løve’s cleverness eventually becomes little more than that. The fact that he seems so happy with his kids makes Grégoire’s death all the more horribly baffling – why would he deprive himself of the joy he gets from them, let alone deprive them of him? You begin to realise, however, that Hansen-Løve has stressed the happy family life only in order to maximise the impact of its savage termination – and that she is not going to probe the implications of what has happened in the lives of the survivors. (Once you start to read the director in this way, other things, which you had admired, seem something of an artifice too – like the complete interiorisation of Grégoire’s anguish in the opening scenes.) A more basic problem with the film is that, once Grégoire is dead, the life goes out of the story. It struck me at an early stage that the beautiful, guileless-looking Chiara Caselli as Sylvia wasn’t registering strongly. I didn’t know in advance exactly what the story comprised but I had seen trailers that made it obvious that Grégoire departed the scene. I therefore wondered how Caselli would manage the move to centre stage once De Lencquesaing was gone. The simple answer is that she doesn’t and nor does any other character. The effect of the irrevocable removal of the centre of our attention is odd because no attempt is made to replace him. And, apart from their immediate expressions of grief, the particularity of his death doesn’t reverberate powerfully in the lives of his wife and children.
There are good performances by, as well as De Lencquesaing, the three girls who play his daughters – Alice Gautier, Manelle Driss and, especially, Alice De Lencquesaing (presumably Louis-Do’s real-life daughter), as the fifteen-year-old Clémence, who is affectingly poised between being a child and a young woman. This actress looks capable of animating the horror of losing an adored father through unexpected suicide yet Hansen-Løve gives her no opportunities to do so. Instead, Clémence starts reading letters from Grégoire’s first wife Isabelle about their son Moune – who, on the evidence of the letters, seems pathologically withdrawn – and goes to visit her. (It’s unclear quite how little Clémence knew about her father’s first family up to this point.) She learns from his mother that Moune, now a husband and father himself, loathes Grégoire for walking out twenty years ago. Isabelle, however, bears him no ill will at all. Once she finds this out, Clémence seems to have no further curiosity about the matter.
Although film producers have traditionally been stigmatised as ‘mere’ moneymen, we’re immediately more engaged by Grégoire than we would be if he were a workaholic businessman with a job outside cinema. We’re engaged even before we learn what a bright, cultured man he is and how passionately he wants to invest in creative filmmaking talent. The picture briefly goes off at an interesting tangent, when Clémence spends time with Arthur Malkavian (Igor Hansen-Løve, Mia’s brother?), a young screenwriter whom Grégoire signed up shortly before his death. Arthur chatters on to Clémence about the latest draft of his screenplay (with ‘Johnny Remember Me’ on the soundtrack – giving an inevitably powerful twist to the proceedings as far as I was concerned). I wondered for a moment if Mia Hansen-Løve was heading for Tarantino country, about to suggest that even if life doesn’t go on, cinema always will. By contrast, Sylvia’s attempts to save her husband’s company, centred on a dull sequence with the notoriously ‘difficult’ Swedish director whose budget overrun was responsible for a good part of the financial mess, are anaemic. In spite of the widow’s saying she’ll fight to the end to save Moon Films, she seems to be going through the motions. When the company finally goes into liquidation, it doesn’t seem to matter much. The scene in which Sylvia and the three girls go to the company offices to say their goodbyes and pick up various mementos is no more than sweetly, sadly amusing.
Of course we can accept that, in life rather than art, a fatal act like Grégoire‘s might remain horrifyingly inexplicable but I get suspicious when ‘realism’ is used to avoid the issue in the way Mia Hansen-Løve uses it here. The writer-director seems strangely uninterested in what Grégoire’s suicide – as distinct from his death – means to the people he leaves behind. Perhaps the explanation is in this quote from Hansen-Løve, which appears in a piece on the film in this week’s The Big Issue:
‘The film is inspired by the story of Humbert Balsan who passed away in 2005 … Balsan was a risk-taker and fond of young people. He was producing my first feature film when he committed suicide. … His actions didn’t alter anything. … Of course, perhaps a month later, he would have put things in perspective and things wouldn’t have felt so dramatic. But what matters is that at this particular moment, his feeling of despair overruled.’
The story of a man who discovers that, like it or not, his life revolves ultimately round his work rather than his family is a very credible contemporary theme and it’s clear that the material means a lot personally to Mia Hansen-Løve. But if all she has to reveal is that ‘at this particular moment’ her protagonist’s ‘feeling of despair overruled’, Father of My Children might has well have wrapped at the point at which Grégoire pulled the trigger.
7 March 2010