The Son (Le Fils, 2002)

 

Picture: B     Sound: B-     Extras: B     Film: B

 

 

When I last watched a film by Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, I was not happy with it.  La Promesse (reviewed on this site) was about a bad father/son relationship that held few surprises and offered no new ideas, but it had vitality.  The filmmaking brothers return to this territory with greater success with The Son (Le Fils, 2002), which offers a more challenging premise that does not allow them to so easily lose focus.

 

Olivier Gourmet returns as a different kind of father, one who has lost his son to a murder.  The carpenter is teaching a new generation of young men his craft, then something unexpected happens.  The young man responsible for his son’s death shows up for training!

 

Still devastated five years later, the divorced teacher immediately recognizes the new student and it snaps him out of his haze as he runs around to keep making certain what he is seeing is really who he is seeing.  He keeps doing what he can to confirm the identity of the new arrival, then gets him to be in his class.  Instead of a senseless murder thriller, we get a character study.

 

There has been a huge deficit and crisis in the way American cinema has dealt with masculinity since the 1980s became extremely regressive on the matter.  The situation has not improved since, and has even mutated into a disaster that Hollywood has yet to recover from.  There are few exceptions and foreign imports have been sadly lacking in this respect.  The Son deals directly with the pain and loss of the child, though the murder is not reenacted, something most Hollywood films would do in a way that desecrated the film and its audience.

 

Instead, the screenplay by the Dardennes allows the fateful act to unspool as part of the narrative in which the sonless father must decide how to resolve his pain and loss.  It turns out he was a good man and good father because his moral center will not allow him to just go and physically destroy the recently released Francis (Morgan Marinne in an impressive performance as well); he just wants to know the truth of how it happened and why.  There is guilt, transference, regret, and even temptation to take the easy way out.  Instead, his maturity and the future he wished for his now-broken family remain.

 

We will not even consider the idea of a carpenter passing on knowledge or the trainees being told how to handle the burden of carrying long pieces of wood around.  In fairness to the film, it is never religious or ever that pretentious.  The idea of an adult man raising many young men into a profession, craft, and skill that can help them provide for themselves does also seem like a man trying to compensate for his loss by passing on what he has to offer to the next generation.  Ex-wife Magali (Isabella Soupart) is now pregnant and with another man, going out of her way not to know the gender of her child, wanting her own new start.  When she finds out about the school situation, she to starts hanging around the area, due to the horror that he is going to teach the killer of their own dead son.

 

Despite the shaky camerawork, more of a problem in the Steadicam era and a cliché of bad filmmaking, cinematographer Alain Marcoen makes this approach work in a way that renews its credibility.  The anamorphically enhanced image has the 1.66 X 1 frame within a 1.78 X 1 framing and it looks good.  Color is consistent, depth is present, and there is some good detail throughout.  The Dolby Digital 5.1 AC-3 sound is not bad, but for a film that is often silent and then dialogue based, only so dynamic and it does not need to try so hard.  It works just fine for what is here, though DTS could have made this even warmer and more involving.

 

Extras include two 33+ minutes long separate interviews with Gourmet and the Dardennes, both of which are exceptional and insightful, plus their filmographies with a single text page devoted to Marinne, 25 stills, and 5 trailers for New Yorker DVDs including this one.  This all adds up to one of the best in a superlative series of films on DVD by New Yorker, which is why they remain one of the best true cinema companies in the business.  The Son is an exceptional film that cannot reach a wide enough audience, and that is why you must see it.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo