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September 12-18, 2002

movies

Daddy Dearest

PATRICIDE IN THE SPRING: Berling and Bouquet share a not-too-tender moment.

Father and son reunite but don't bond in the calculating How I Killed My Father.

How I Killed My Father

by Sam Adams

How I Killed My FatherDirected by Anne Fontaine A New Yorker Films release Opens Friday at Ritz East recommended

Talk about truth in advertising. Anne Fontaine’s How I Killed My Father is as prickly a description of the father-son relationship as they come. “I’m not obligated to love you” is the film’s version of paternal-filial communication, and Fontaine (Dry Cleaning) paces her subtle allegory with icy reserve. The metaphorical killing of the film’s title refers not to a hot-blooded act of passion but a slow grinding down, a son’s lifelong attempt to distance himself from his absentee father. The film’s struggles are more internal than external, belied by the placid surface of the material comfort which Jean-Luc (Charles Berling) has worked so hard to acquire. Fit and attractive at 40, Jean-Luc has built a carefully ordered life and set himself at the center of it. Small wonder that something comes along to disturb it.

That something is Maurice (Michel Bouquet), Jean-Luc's long-unseen father, who appears in the crowd just as Jean-Luc is accepting a local civic honor in a ceremony at his own house. ("That's how it's done around here," he explains.) Adding to the frisson is that fact that only a few minutes earlier we've seen Jean-Luc receive a letter stating that his father died suddenly in Africa, never getting the opportunity to return to France. It may seem odd that Jean-Luc isn't more inquisitive about his father's apparently mistaken death, but the rapport between them is so uncomfortable, verging on hostile, it's not so surprising the subject never comes up.

As Bouquet plays him, Maurice is solid, almost immobile, as if the scene had come into being around him. Far from being a ghost, he makes everyone else seem unreal. It's clear that Jean-Luc has inherited his control fetish from his father, but he's made the mistake of putting down roots, which makes him vulnerable. Maurice has another son, Patrick (Stéphane Guillon), an amateur actor and comedian currently serving as his brother's driver; his life is everything Jean-Luc's is not (including successful). He works out his feelings in a series of serio-comic monologues which punctuate the picture -- at first, we're clearly on stage at the nightclub where we've seen him perform, but later the background seems to drop away and is replaced with flat black, as if we've passed inside Patrick's mind. It's a particular strength of Fontaine's direction that she lets her actors convey so much with so little. Patrick may be a natural ham, but Maurice and Jean-Luc, even Jean-Luc's wife, Isabelle, traffic in the glacial demeanors of the desperately unhappy. How I Killed My Father is almost rabidly anti-sentimental, a pointed rebuke to the idea that happy bonds between parent and child evolve without effort or attention. There's only a hair of Oedipal drama in the film, but plenty of signs pointing to the fact that to succeed in life is to obliterate those who came before.

It goes without saying that you'd never find characters like these in an American film -- even our misanthropes are colorful, or at least pitiable. And unlike Todd Solondz or Neil LaBute, Fontaine doesn't take pleasure in depicting sociopaths, or expect us to reward her for doing so. Her interest seems to be in the emotional relations of characters who don't, so to speak, emotionally relate. Bouquet's performance is an especially finely tuned one, since even when he's present, his character is only halfway in the scene, as if there's always somewhere he'd rather be -- if only he had anywhere to be at all. Indigent and alone in his last years, Maurice is unrepentant about the life he's led, but our own sentiment keeps telling us that he wouldn't show up on his son's doorstep unless he hoped to resolve their relationship -- or would he. "What's between us will always be there, whether we're alive or dead," Jean-Luc says coldly, not as a promise of connection but an affirmation of discontent. People are who they are, and it's only a matter of how long it takes you to figure it out.

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How I Killed My Father is cynical for sure, but it's not soul-killing. There's enough desperation in Jean-Luc's bid to keep his life as it is to let you think he's as much machine as man, and though the movie largely consists of watching Jean-Luc's life tumble down around his ears, what we've seen of it is enough to convince us that it's all for the better. Perhaps the trick is to convince you that the characters have to get better, since they couldn't possibly get any worse.