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.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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