COMMENT J'AI TUÉ
MON PÈRE
HOW I KILLED MY FATHER |
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Director:
Anne Fontaine
Screenplay: J. Fieschi & Fontaine
Cast: Maurice: Michel Bouquet
Jean-Luc: Charles Berling
Isa: Natacha Régnier
Patrick: Stéphane Guillon
Myriem: Amira Casar
Awards: Best Actor (Bouquet), César Awards (2002).
Running time: 100 minutes
Production: France, 2000
Rating: Not rated (language, sexual situations)
Gauge: 16 & 35mm (color)
Language: French
Distributor: New Yorker Films
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"As
the film's characters head into uncharted, inevitably explosive emotional
territory against the backdrop of Jocelyn Pook's unnerving music,
you can feel Fontaine's intelligence probing and illuminating this
high-tension, high-stakes situation. Truly, there can be nothing as
complex as the simplest human relationships, and nothing as satisfying
as a film that understands that as this one does." Kenneth Turan,
Los Angeles Times. |
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A film of
polished surfaces, stillness and chilly silences, this metaphysical
thriller from the director of Dry Cleaning examines an Oedipal
conflict with a difference. Jean-Luc, celebrated gerontologist in
swanky Versailles, has constructed his life for maximum control
and minimum friction. His elegant wife, Isa, convinced by Jean-Luc
that she’s physically unfit to have children, serves principally
for social events. His brother, Patrick, a stand-up comic of modest
talent, is employed as his chauffeur. Myriem, his assistant at the
clinic, provides sex along with her other duties. Jean-Luc’s
icy calm is shattered when his father, Maurice, unexpectedly turns
up looking as penniless and hapless as the prodigal son. Although
he abandoned his family decades ago to practice medicine in Africa,
Maurice offers no excuses and shows no guilt; rather, he seems disappointed
by Jean-Luc’s inability to understand him. Insinuating himself
into the family, he gains Isa’s trust and reveals the shaky
foundations on which their bourgeois dream is built. Bouquet turns
in a pitch-perfect performance as the sphingine patriarch who may
be vicious or benign, sage or charlatan, while Fontaine creates
a world of such breathless rigidity that a family argument stands
out as life-threateningly violent.
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| PHOTO New
Yorker Films |
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