THE FATHER OF MY CHILDREN
Most films about filmmaking often suffer from an insider world vision. It isn’t easy to give people who are unfamiliar with the process a first-person perspective on working in a profession that relies so heavily on illusion and the suspension of disbelief. Often, these types of 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.
In the new film The Father of My Children, 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 behaving in typical fashion for a movie producer – juggling two separate phones at once, as he drives home to his family. But Canvel is juggling even more than we realize at first: 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 their three daughters, he transforms 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 at work.
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 The Father of My Children 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 oftentimes has to scramble even for the money required to get film processing companies to release the prints of the films that they have contracted to process.
What is most striking about the film is the family interaction, and the way that Canvel/Balsan immerses himself in it while at the same time repressing so much of what is going on so that he can hold on to that warm embrace. Or at least this is what he believes. It is also what ultimately leads to his undoing, and is, of course, what makes this 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, while rarely (if ever) getting to express who we really are.
In this age of excess and consumption, with so many of us constantly on the verge of financial collapse, maintaining these illusions that we create about ourselves is usually quite costly. And because our identities tend to be so closely tied to what we do and how much we have, we tend to fold up emotionally as well. The Father of My Children is as much about how Canvel bears this burden as it is about how his family comes to the same realization. By the end, we see that his oldest daughter, Clémence (already a young adult) has embarked on her own voyage self-invention (or self-reinvention), learning the same lesson that we are all taught about finding and shaping that fiction, that identity.
The Father of My Children is now in theaters.
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.)
By Dianne L. Brooks
