The aftermath of a death for friends and family is a topic ripe for pop psychology and easy tears. The response to suicide allows still more room for anguished browbeating and blame. Mia Hansen-Love’s The Father of My Children (Le Pere de Mes Enfants) does not succumb to these temptations, and reaches for a more profound wisdom that offers a deeper comfort but no answers about why a person should decide to take his or her own life. While loosely based on real people in the writer-director’s own circle, this is not so much a biopic but an existential meditation.
We are introduced to Gregoire Canvel, a busy film producer, in a long tracking sequence in which he walks and drives from Paris to his home in the country, almost continually on the phone, dealing, solving problems, even telling a white lie to his wife. He gets home to a family that he clearly loves, and which clearly loves him ... but work continues to intrude.
Unhurriedly, even as Canvel tackles the tasks of running a small but busy production house, we realize that his business is in trouble. Too much money is going out. We also learn about his love of cinema and his determination to support directors he believes in, whatever their commercial track record.
Canvel is a man comfortable in his professional skin, and it is easy for him to hide the mounting pressure from friends and family. Finally, almost suddenly, it becomes too much. He takes his own life.
The second half of the film deals with the fallout of this act, both professionally and personally. Everyone is appalled at the death, but this is balanced with personal feelings of those left behind, not least staff at his company who find themselves out of a job virtually overnight. The recrimination and anger that a husband and father could act in so selfish a manner are worked through by his wife and daughter, even as they figure out what to do with the production company that represented such an important part of Canvel’s life. In both halves of the film, The Father of My Children never forgets that life is not just about emotions,
but also about money, reputation and memory.
Canvel is portrayed as a man greedy for life, who lived it to the full both as a professional and a family man. At the core was a certain self-belief that drives all of us through the daily ups and downs of life, but when he felt that this had been irreparably hurt, he could find no way out. As his wife tells his angry and grieving children, daddy was so sad he forgot about us just for a moment. But in that moment, the whole world changed.
While The Father of My Children focuses on a single act of suicide, it is a film that is fiercely, almost defiantly, about life. Life with all its mundane business that shapes the person. It leads us not so much to sorrow over the misfortunes of others, but to reflect on what we value in life and how we might respond if it were taken away. While sensitive to the fate of its characters, the questions it poses are more philosophical than emotional.
Exceptions to the rule are sometimes revealing. For a brief few years, there was an emerging ideological split between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that appeared to be pushing the DPP in a direction that would be considered more liberal, and the KMT more conservative. In the previous column, “The KMT-DPP’s bureaucrat-led developmental state” (Dec. 11, page 12), we examined how Taiwan’s democratic system developed, and how both the two main parties largely accepted a similar consensus on how Taiwan should be run domestically and did not split along the left-right lines more familiar in
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