Movie Review: The Father of My Children

LITTLE ROCK — Winner of the Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 2009, Mia Hansen-Love’s The Father of My Children is a stylish, subtle and devastating film about a recognizable good person whose world gradually and believably falls away.

We first meet Gregoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) as he’s driving from Paris to his country house at the end of the work week, balancing his cell phone on his shoulder as he smokes a cigarette and steers casually through traffic. From a series of brief, realistic conversations that don’t feel at all expository, we’re able to piece together that Gregoire is an independent film producer, a money man working outside the mainstream, withfragile little projects. He thinks of himself as, if not exactly an artist, at least a facilitator of cinema.

And things are not all well with his company - he’s dealing with, among other issues, impatient creditors, an unhappy star and a difficult director who sounds more than a little like the prickly auteur Lars Von Trier. (Or maybe the Hungarian director Bela Tarr.)

“He’s bleeding us dry,” Gregoire’s assistant says, warning him that he needs to confront the troublesome director, to get a handle on his profligate spending.

But Gregoire doesn’t especially look like a man in trouble; he has about him an easy air, and a kind of calming magnetism that leads us to understand how he could inveigle hard-headed businessmen to invest in someone else’s unremunerative dreams.

He has a lovely home and a beautiful family - his wife Sylvia (Chiara Caselli) and three lovely daughters, Valentine (Alice Gautier), Billie (Manelle Driss) and the teenaged Clemence (Alice de Lencquesaing, Louis-Do’s real-life daughter). Even though he’s obviously preoccupied by work, he’s got an enviable life.

Mia Hansen-Love, a 29-year-old writer-director who has written film criticism for Cahiers du Cinema (and who, incidentally, is married to Olivier Assayas), drew inspiration for her film from the story of Humbert Balsan, who produced more than 60 films - only a handful of which might be recognizable to casual moviegoers - and was seen as a champion of Arab cinema. She’s a remarkably restrained filmmaker, seemingly incapable of overstatement even when she’s working with potentially melodramatic material. Her method is observational, the small reveals of accumulated details. She doesn’t seek to explain anything to us, she simply lets us watch. And understand.