I once wrote:Philippe Lioret has not made a bad movie yet ;I would go as far as to write that "16 ans""Toutes Nos Envies" ,"Je Vais Bien Ne T'en Fais Pas" ,"L'Equipier" "Welcome" or "Tombés Du Ciel"have placed him firmly and definitively among French finest contemporary directors .With "Le Fils De Jean " ,he's simply become,along Robert Guédiguian my favorite contemporary French director..
However ,In my book , I consider this MTV work a faux pas ; the nonlinear narrative ,the first time the director has used this style, is chiefly here to conceal a melodramatic story , as old as the hills,which reminds the old cinema buffs of works like Christian-Jaque's "un revenant" (1946) , Louis Daquin's "le voyageur de la Toussaint" (1942) or even Denys De La Patellière's ""les grandes familles "(1958); I did love this stuff ,but that was then ,and this is now ;as for the denouement ,it is by far the most disappointing one Lioret has ever made : the average viewer has at least seen it a hundred times or more.
Unsympathetic characters verge on cardboard ;even the hero himself is hardly better than the la-di-da mom or the selfish fraud daddy : he takes advantage of them to carry on his studies, loosely to put it mildly, and most of the time, he lets poor ol' grannie down .
Old people's fate should have been the main subject ,;families who get rid of them just to latch onto their dough ,it happens too many times ; but this most interesting part of a muddled screenplay takes a back seat .Had he focussed on the grandma/grandson relationship, the director would have made a heartfelt plea on behalf of the abandoned old people ,be they wealthy or destitute.
For the non-french audience , a Paris -Brest is a French dessert made of choux pastry and hazelnut praliné cream ; in the movie ,it's the comings and goings of a not-so-admirable hero between the capital and the Breton harbor.
