‘The Quiet Son’ Review: Vincent Lindon Shines In This Timely Story Of A Family Torn Apart By Tragedy – Venice Film Festival

Damon Wise
·5 min read

This terrific character study by Delphine and Muriel Coulin comes at an apposite time in today’s climate, as far-right political groups all over the globe increasingly get their claws into the angry and dispossessed. It’s also an unusually inquisitive look at the bonds that exist between men: their tribes, rituals and — ultimately — their responsibilities. Central to its very primal depiction of the gulf between left and right is star Vincent Lindon as Pierre, a widowed father of young men in provincial France who tries in vain to stop his eldest son becoming radicalized by his friends and by online hate groups; Lindon’s soulful turn rightly snagged him the festival’s Best Actor award.

The boy’s name is Fus (Benjamin Voison), and the dynamic between father and son is established with incredible economy in the opening scenes. Pierre has been working all night on the railway track, while Fus has been out clubbing (the film opens with thudding techno and scenes of Fus’s shamanistic dancing). When Pierre returns home, he wakes Fus and makes his breakfast. On the radio, a talking head is pontificating about the young people being neglected by the government (a “forgotten generation”). After Fus emerges, Pierre takes him to football practice, where he scores the winning goal. Fus also plays dirty, committing an egregious foul that does not go unnoticed by Pierre.

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Pierre also clocks that Fus has fallen in with a new set of friends, an unseemly looking bunch, and he is concerned when a workmate tells him that someone who looked very much like Fus, wearing a dragon-logo jacket, was among a mob that recently attacked a left-wing rally. Pierre, once an activist but now done with “sticking up posters and all that”, covers for Fus, stating that they were both at home at the time of the incident. However, Fus, does own such a jacket and was out with his new friends after the game.

At home, Pierre finds the jacket, throws it in the trash, and waits for Fus to come home. Fus is angry and flustered when Pierre confronts him. “It’s nothing political,” he says, to Pierre’s astonishment. “You know what?” he says. “It’s when they say it isn’t political that you should worry.” But Fus flounces out, and Pierre looks at his son’s online profile, seeing his affiliation with websites such as “France for the French” where he “likes” comments such as “This is our country” and others with a more racist flavor (“Send them back to Africa”). Pierre follows him to place where these men, known as ultras, hang out, and finds a subcultural haven swathed in swastikas and simmering with aggression (there’s even bare-knuckle boxing).

Pierre’s other son, Louis (Stefan Crepon) — the quiet one of the title — is watching things unfold with bemused detachment. Fus is in his early 20s, a metalworker by trade, but Louis, who turns 20 during the movie, is an academic and has been offered a place at the Sorbonne. As he crams for his exams, Louis brings over a friend, whose liberal views are scoffed at by the increasingly vitriolic Fus. The friend posits that the mainstream lefts parties are neglecting the proletariat, making them increasingly reluctant vote, but Fus thinks they never cared in the first place (“We’re just cannon fodder,” he says). In fact, he thinks this public apathy to down to the fact that the public is just fed up with the system. “We tried the left wing; we tried the right wing. We need another solution.”

Nevertheless, Pierre continues to have hope, taking his sons to a football game to see the local team F.C. Metz. Something has to give, however, and one day, though he has explicitly forbidden Fus from seeing his right-wing friends while living under his roof, Pierre returns home to find the boy lying — black and blue and bloodied — on the sofa, having been beaten up by a gang of antifa activists. His injuries are so severe that Fus’s football career is now effectively over; he can’t walk, feed or dress himself (“It’s so humiliating,” he laments). As he recovers Pierre is always there for him, hoping he’ll go back to his old ways, little knowing that things are about to get much worse.

Though it is based on a novel (What You Need from the Night by Laurent Petitmangin, 2020), The Quiet Son has an immediacy that feels almost improvised. The Coulins have a subtle way with words, and their self-adapted script really drills down into what lies between the lines. The death of Pierre’s wife, mother to the two boys, is a case in point, a seismic event that, though it is integral to the trajectory of the drama, the three men never talk about. And when Fus finds himself in court, on very serious charges, Lindon powerfully leans into the performance that’s required of him, playing a father coming to terms with his son’s thoughts, consequences and actions, a stain on all their lives that will never be erased.

The ending leaves some room for redemption, but not a lot. Instead, Pierre is left facing an uncertain future (how will the “quiet” son react to his elder brother’s criminal legacy?). It makes some obvious points, but those points are still valid, and the Coulins have crafted a gripping societal drama about the quagmire that is modern politics.

Title: The Quiet Son
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Sales agent: Playtime
Directors/screenwriters: Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin
Cast: Vincent Lindon, Benjamin Voisin, Stefan Crepon
Running time: 1 hr 50 mins

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