‘The Quiet Son’ Review: Vincent Lindon Stars in a Stolid Parenting Drama With a Social-Issues Slant
If you’re one of those people whose first instinct in cases of youth violence is to blame the parents, “The Quiet Son,” the new Venice-competing title from directors Delphine and Muriel Coulin (“17 Girls”) has a valuable perspective, telling the believably downbeat story of a 22-year-old French guy who becomes embroiled in right-wing street politics, exclusively from the point of view of his loving but uncomprehending father. If, however, you’re already of the opinion that the issue is more complex than simple parental negligence, the solidly straightforward film has less to offer, as it states and restates the problem of rising, increasingly aggressive alt-right sympathies among young, working class populations, without providing any novel or particularly useful insights into it.
Adapted by the Coulin sisters from the book “Ce qu’il faut de nuit” by Laurent Petitmangin, the film’s main attraction beyond its torn-from-the-headlines topicality, is Vincent Lindon (so often cast as a blue-collar worker he could confidently launch his own line of high-vis jackets and durable workwear), once again making the most of a gruffly sympthetic everyman role. Playing railway repairman Pierre, a father who has raised two sons singlehandedly following the death of their mother when they were boys, Lindon presents an entirely convincing portrait of Pierre’s arid anguish at gradually losing one of them to an ideology that, as a Frenchman of an age to have grown up in the wake of May ’68, he cannot himself understand.
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The sons form a believable if slightly formulaic dichotomy between booksmart, Sorbonne-bound Louis (Stephan Crepon) and sporty technical-college dropout Fus (Benjamin Voisin), a nickname short for “Fussball” which he acquired as a soccer-mad kid. That it has a German derivation is unsurprising; the family lives in the historically contested French region of Lorraine which has its own proud regional identity, making its inhabitants ripe targets for anti-immigration rhetoric on two different levels. “You can become French,” says Fus during one fractious exchange with his dad, “But you are born Lorrainian.”
As the movie begins, Fus has already fallen in with a crew of far-right sympathizers, whom Pierre shuns, and with whom he forbids him to fraternize, as long as he’s living at home. But he doesn’t realize how deeply embedded his son already is — and how often he has been lying about his whereabouts – until an SNCF co-worker claims to have recognised Fus among the gang of agitators thuggishly disrupting a left-wing leafleting campaign. Pierre automatically covers for his boy, but back at home confronts him, leading to the first of Fus’ many walkouts. Yet he alway seems to gravitate back home, where he will always be forgiven: One of movie’s best aspects is the touching closeness that exists between all three characters, even when any one of them is on the outs with the other. One night when Pierre stumbles in late having drunk through his worries for his son, Fus creeps into his father’s room to tenderly remove the boots he never took off before passing out. Same goes for the brotherly bond, as beautifully played by Crepon and Voisin, with Louis sometimes taking Fus’ side against Pierre, even though he shares none of his sibling’s burgeoning neo-fascist leanings, but just as often petitioning Fus to cut dad some slack.
The Coulins perhaps over-emphasize the everyday, ordinary nature of this good man’s gradual heartbreak and the filmmaking style reflects it. Aside from a few atypically expressive flourishes, Frédéric Noirhomme’s photography is frank and unromanced, composed so you do not feel its composition. And while there’s no real need for this story to top out at nearly two hours in length, the editing, from Béatrice Herminie and Pierre Deschamps, keeps a measured pace that neither flags nor contrives some sort of artificial momentum. But at times this restrained naturalism borders on blandness, as in a late courtroom scene when the speech Pierre delivers — though suited to his plain-spoken character — could have used a few more oratorical fireworks to achieve the emotional climax it never quite reaches.
“If you’re not with us, you’re against us,” says Fus, inevitably, at one far-gone point. “But ‘us’ used to mean just us three,” replies Pierre, and Lindon’s cracked voice and weary visage could belong to any of a million parents who suddenly find that the kids they raised so carefully, with all the love and guidance in the world, have become adults they cannot abide. “The Quiet Son” breaks little new ground, and its filmmaking is hardly inspired, but a sensitive cast and a sobering story do prove the truism that if you love someone, you have to let them go. Even if that means they fall.
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