Comment j'ai tué mon père

"My Father and I", as the DVD was entitled, spends its time examining the emotional erosion of an icy, controlling, stilted, and successful Gerontologist upon the return of the father who abandoned him as a child. A well presented psychodrama with a solid cast, good production value, and a meager storyline, this film tells its tale of gathering rage cloaked in polite conversation through nuances of body language, behavior, and minimal dialogue. Subtitled and ambiguous in beginning and end, "My Father and I" was well received by both critics and public the public at large given allowances for subtitles. Recommended for French film fans into psychodramas. (B+)

Many French films over the decades have begun with a voice, with or without images, one of the characters, usually the protagonist, speaking directly to the audience. "Comment j'ai tué mon père" begins with a male voice speaking, over blank-screen credits, about the trials of late middle age. Since our only other info has been the film's first-person title, when the bearded speaker materializes we assume he's our protagonist. He's just young enough to have a living parent, maybe one about to die. When the camera pulls back to reveal the gerontologist listening, we see this secondary figure as a prop, a movie cliché. But a cut disillusions. The speaker will never reappear. It's the gerontologist's story.

Director Anne Fontaine's slight of hand continues throughout the film, so pervasively that it's difficult to go on here with giving away too much. It's far from only the gerontologist's story. At least three characters, not counting the opening speaker above, carry the point of view. Yet it's not "Rashomon." Perhaps appropriate in a film about aging, with a gerontologist dead center, the time line seldom wavers.

How I Killed My Father (aka My Father and I) is a story about parental abandonment and filial rage, told in a very calm way. The characters hardly ever break a sweat as they deal with irresponsible fathers, feckless siblings, childlessness and the other griefs of life. The locale is, after all, Versailles, and the emotional temperature never gets above zero in those manicured gardens.

Jean-Luc invents a family for himself to replace the one he lost at the age of ten. He becomes a father substitute for his brother Patrick--imagine having your brother as chauffeur and gofer. He presides over this clinic for rich middle-aged people trying to regain their youth, much like a father and his children. If his wife is tiring of being an ornament, he can handle her moods: after all, he's got her believing she can't have kids. The mistress at the clinic can be kept happy by the promise of an apartment. The only thing he can't allow is to be abandoned by any of them.

The conflict with his father is the occasion for many droll exchanges between Charles Berling and Michel Bouquet. Jacques Fieschi, the co-author of this script, also wrote Un coeur en hiver, Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud and Sade, some of my favorite studies of bleak hearts in comfortable surroundings.

In 1997, Anne Fontaine made an idiosyncratic film named "Nettoyage à Sec" in which a mysterious young man, Loïc shattered the upstart world of a couple of dry cleaners. Miou-Miou acted the woman while Charles Berling was her husband. Four years later, the female filmmaker finds again her main actor for a very similar role and a film which resembles its 1997 companion.

Here, the disruptive element isn't a young man but an elderly one acted by Michel Bouquet in a mind-boggling performance. After many years spent in research in Africa, he unexpectedly resurfaces in France to pay a visit to his sons. Berling is a doctor who has everything to be happy: a private hospital that works well, a lascivious mansion and a lovely spouse (Natacha Régnier) and he even saved from distress his brother whom he hired as his chauffeur. Is this posh universe serendipitous? Bouquet's presence will reveal the other side of this lush scenery as well as many things about his past, Berling's and his brother's. A good proportion of these secrets have something eerie and are likely to explain the current situation.

As soon as Bouquet arrives, Anne Fontaine exudes an unnerving climate and keeps a low-key tonality to better capture a high disquiet. Rather than to deliver banal explanations that would have rushed the film towards miscarriage, she prefers to call upon the viewer's imagination and to let the unsaid prevail to interpret the numerous zones of shadow and ambiguity the characters have deep down inside them. What also cements her talent is that she eschews a good number of easy moments in which the characters' reactions would have been so predictable. Distance is her key word to shoot her characters and she sends away the father and his son without pronouncing in favor of either even if she has an ounce of sympathy at the tail end when they feel lost.

Once again, Michel Bouquet's acute look and ubiquity are to be praised. He just has to pronounce a cue with his hoarse voice to fill one sequence with intensity. Berling and Régnier are up to scratch him. With Marion Vernoux and a few other ones, Anne Fontaine may be the finest French female filmmaker of these last years. Perhaps one will just regret this detail: Bouquet sees his son again when the latter is at the peak of his success and invites the whole community at his home. This trick has been used many times before.

I was very interested to see the previous film of director Anne Fontaine before she did the excellent 'Nathalie'. 'Comment j'au tue mon pere' did not disappoint, although it may not be a easy film for everybody's taste.

Despite the title this is no detective story, and there is almost no physical violence in this movie. It is the world of the French middle-high class, people are polite and talk quiet. A well-doing doctor lives with his wife and his brother when their lives are changed by the arrival - as in a inverse parable - of the prodigal father, the one who left the boys as kids. Not only that the characters cannot re-do the time lost, but they do not seem to even look or express any affection. The emotions behind their cold masks are however not less stronger, with frustration and fear dominating the father-sons interaction.

The movie is very well acted with Michel Bouquet and Charles Berling giving powerful performances in the principal roles. Although the cinematography is a little banal, the movie is to be remembered for the intensity of the hidden conflicts, well brought to the screen.