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The father of my children
Genre: Drama
Death, family, film, Munich Film Festival 2009
homage to a film producer
This is an enormously difficult issue: how does a family react when the father suddenly shoots? Mia Hansen-Love tells of this blow with an admirable tenderness. It describes the different types of grief work with an emotional density that is very quiet and therefore more natural. Although it may sound strange: For long stretches, this is a life-affirming film.
Grégoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) loves his life: his job as a film producer as well as his wife and three daughters. He is full of energy, no difficulty is out of the way and, despite high occupational exposure is always a big heart and an open ear. But at the same time by several mishaps his company gets into the red. Grégoire is (too) long on the principle of hope. And when the bank finally was turning the flow of money, he chases a bullet in the head.
There are a number of beautiful scenes that engage very sensitive to the feelings of grief. In one of them, we see almost nothing, for the river is down to an evening where the family is together with a good friend. The surprising darkness in the whole district can be created with the idea to go on the road and to look to the stars. The mood is good, but not dropped, melancholy and serene at the same time. A magical moment in which the memory is available to the deaths in the visual language.
Director Mia Hansen-Løve found a number of such settings in which we understand everything that is spoken without. She tells unspectacular, almost daily, but that very intense. Especially in the cut is to understand who suffer emotional development, the survivors. In moments of quiet desperation scenes follow that show that life goes on, even if such a phrase meant to depict the feelings can not.
Perhaps the director and author of the screenplay so succeeded so well, because it close truth in this true destiny. The film character Canvel is the independent producer Humbert Balsan modeled on Paris, who chose to commit suicide in February 2005. With him, the director has in her first All is forgiven worked for a year. The external facts of the film are therefore broadly in line with reality, the psychology of family relations, however, is freely developed. When the script was ready, it is the widow Humbert Balsan has indeed read. But the independence of the fictional text has accepted completely.
Mia Hansen-Love said that she had not the father of my children / Le père de mes enfants planned as a tribute to Humbert Balsan. But in a sense, it has set this producer but a memorial. For so sensitive and so warm rarely a producer has been described in a film. This man is anything but a money bag. He is shown as a man who loves the cinema and even after so many years can still be inspired by a good script. Not because it promises a blockbuster. But simply because it is well taken, and from life. Just as this film.
(Peter Gutting)
Title: The father of my children Original Title: Le père de mes enfants Country of production: , Germany, France Year of Production: 2009 (# ) Length: 112 (Min.) Distribution: color film rental
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