France 2009
Directed by
Mia Hansen-Love
110 minutes
Rated M
Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
Father Of My Children
Synopsis: Film producer Grégoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) seems to have it all - a beautiful, devoted wife (Chiara Caselli) and three cute-as-buttons daughters, an apartment in Paris and a house in the country. He loves making films but he’s drowning in debt. His charm is all he has to parlay with and it’s not working
Father Of My Children is a somewhat frustrating film. It is well-made on all levels, one of the best representations of Paris street life I can recall having seen for a long time and very much in a style with which we are familiar from France (it won the Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize in Cannes in 2009). It is a smoothly told tale of quotidian life for a group of well-to-do Parisians, specifically Grégoire and his family, as they experience its ups and, in this case, largely downs. The problem is that, bar one pivotal moment, nothing much happens. There are many fine French films in which this is the case but what is frustrating about Hansen-Løve’s contribution is that it almost continuously hovers over the possibility, or even probability, that something will. It may be a car accident, it may be a stroke of good luck, it may be a skeleton out of a closet, it maybe a gunshot, but the sense of an impending dramatic turnaround constantly unsettles the mood of the film, undermining the supposed normality of the everyday.
Partly too. there is an issue with Hansen-Løve’s treatment of the story which is loosely based on the life of Humbert Balsan who was the producer of the director's previous film, Tout Est Pardonné. Although the cast are all good, with Louis-Do de Lencquesaing giving a very effective performance in the lead (as also does his real life daughter who plays Grégoire’s eldest daughter), the director tends to follow the narrative rather than the characters with the result that there is very little dramatic engagement between them. Rather, we get a lot of detail, particularly about Grégoire’s business affairs but also his home life, the film cutting quite rapidly from scene to scene, character to character, moment to moment, place to place, all to the accompaniment of much talking. Despite the evident merits of the project all this is quite wearing (frankly, I could have done with a lot less of the supposedly adorable younger daughters) and the final message, sung by Doris Day, is a little too glib to serve the film well.
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