Je suis le seigneur du château (1989) - film review

Brittany, 1954.   After the death of his wife, wealthy landowner Jean Béraud hires a governess, Madame Vernet, to take care of his 10-year old son Thomas.  Madame Vernet has recently been widowed; her husband died fighting in Indochina, leaving her with a son, Charles, who is the same age as Thomas.  Not long after the Vernets’ arrival, Thomas begins to resent their presence and immediately sets about tormenting Charles.  As the boys’ feuding intensifies, they hardly notice the burgeoning romance between their two lonely parents.  When she realises the effect Thomas is having on her son, Madame Vernet leaves the château with Charles, determined never to return.  A short time after, Jean, desperately in love with Madame Vernet, tracks down Charles and pleads with him to persuade her mother to return to him....

Je suis le seigneur du château is one of those strangely beguiling low-key films which at first sight appears very slight but which soon strikes home as a profoundly moving, rather unsettling work which ventures into some very dark territory.  It was the second film to be directed by Régis Wargnier, whose next feature, Indochine (1992) won him critical acclaim and a brace of awards, including an Oscar, a BAFTA, and five Césars.  

In stark contrast to the opulence and scale of Indochine, Je suis le seigneur du château is a much more understated and more tightly focused work.  It is about the the relationship between two young boys who are drawn into a particularly nasty game of psychological warfare, a reaction to the trauma of losing one parent through death and the fear of losing the other through a second marriage.  The film paints a brutal, rigorously unsentimental picture of childhood, combining a harsh realism with an alluringly poetic cinematic style which emphasises the immense vulnerability of the protagonists and their capacity for malice – a shocking contrast with the way in which children are usually depicted in cinema.   

The direction is daring and inspired, with Wargnier showing much greater restraint and sensitivity than in some of his later, more ambitious films.  The sombre photography of the Breton setting is hauntingly beautiful, evoking the raw primitive savagery into which the two young protagonists descend when the civilising influence of love is denied them.  What most sells the film are the compelling naturalistic performances from the two lead child actors – it’s surprising that neither (Régis Arpin and David Behar) went on to pursue a film career since both are extraordinarily convincing in this film.  

The only real fault with the film is Wargnier’s bizarre choice of music: Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliette.   This very heavy and intense music certainly manages to suggest the dismally dark undercurrents and elemental forces which can lead only to tragedy, but you can’t help feeling that a more subtle, especially composed score would have worked much better.  (For British viewers, some sequences of the film now look horribly like a parody trailer for Alan Sugar’s TV reality game show The Apprentice.)  Despite this black mark, Je suis le seigneur du château still manages to be an effective and poignant piece of cinema, unquestionably one of Régis Wargnier better films, and arguably one of the most disturbing and authentic films about the trauma of childhood.

© James Travers 2008

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