THE FATHER OF MY CHILDREN
Most films about filmmaking often suffer from an insider world vision. It isn’t easy to put people who are unfamiliar with the process in the first person perspective of a process that relies on illusion and the suspension of disbelief. Often these films, peopled with the overly self serious, come off seeming exclusive and self indulgent. It is a world that remains closed to most of us, and lots of film professionals want to keep it that way.
Grégoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) produces independent films and has been doing so for 20 years with his company Moon Films. When we meet him he’s being a typical for the “producer” running here and there, juggling calls (on two phones at once) as he drives home to his family. But Canvel is juggling even more, he’s in the middle of production on one film, while trying to finish another and money has run out. We come to learn that 20 years of financial machinations, taking out loans against loans has tapped even his personal finances dry. Yet as he pulls into the driveway of his lovely country house and greets his wife, Sylvia (Chiara Caselli) and three daughters he is transformed into a loving, relaxed, playful father. It’s his family that seems to save him, to pull him out of his day to day struggle.
The director Mia Hansen-Løve began as an actor and film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma before she embarked on directing with her first feature All Is Forgiven. That film was produced by Humbert Balsan, upon whose life this film is based, as a tribute. Balsan supported non-commercial filmmakers, a real commitment to art cinema that probably exacts it’s greatest toll on the producer who is constantly scrambling for money, even, for example, to get the company that processes the film to release the print.
What is most striking about the film is the family interaction, the way that Canvel/Balsan immerses himself in it, while at the same time repressing so much of what is going on in order to hold on to that warm embrace. Or at least this is what he believes and it is ultimately his undoing. And this, of course, is what makes the film oh so universally relatable. Creating fictions about ourselves is what we, as human beings, do, repressing those parts of us that we don’t like or that are socially unacceptable, rarely, if ever, getting to express who we really are.
In this age of excess and consumption maintaining that fiction is usually quite costly, so many of us constantly on the verge of financial collapse. And because our identity tends to be so tied to what we do and how much we have, we fold up as well. This film is as much about how Canvel bears this as it is about how his family comes to the same realization. By the end though we see that his oldest daughter, Clémence, already a young adult has embarked on her own voyage, learning the same lesson that we are all taught about finding and shaping that fiction, that identity.
The Father of My Children opens May 21, 2010.
Written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve; produced by Philippe Martin, David Thion and Oliver Damian; Director of Photography, Pascal Auffray; edited by Marion Monnier.
With: Chiara Caselli (Sylvia); Louis-Do Lencquesaing (Grégoire); Alice de Lencquesaing (Clémence); Alice Gautier (Valentine); Manelle Driss (Billie); Erc Elmosnino (Serge); Sandrine Dumas (Valérie); and Dominique Frot (Bérénice.)
