La Famille Wolberg (2009) - film review

Simon Wolberg is the mayor of a small provincial town in France.  A devoted husband and loving father, his two main obsessions in life are listening to American soul music and interfering in the lives of others.  When he learns that his wife has been having an affair with another man, he wastes no time in tracking down his rival and threatening him with a mild dose of grievous bodily harm.  But Simon has other worries.  His daughter will soon be 18 and is eager to begin a life of her own, perhaps in another country.  His younger son has detected the rift between his parents and has started to  misbehave at school.  And his good-for-nothing brother is threatening his election campaign by defacing his posters.  To top it all, Simon then discovers that he has lung cancer.  He begins to wonder what his life is for...

At first sight, there appears to be little to distinguish La Famille Wolberg from the plethora of films that humorously plot the decline of the familiar dysfunctional family.   In outline, the plot is as clichéd as it is contrived: the husband, a patriarchal type with an over-inflated sense of propriety, discovers his wife has been having and affair, but refuses to tell her he has cancer so as not to ruin his daughter’s 18th birthday.  How can a film that is apparently a hotch-potch of well-worn archetypes possibly have a positive impact?   Yet it does, for this is a film that probes deeply into the psychology of the family and proves to be much more insightful and moving than you might at first expect.  Far from being trite and clichéd, La Famille Wolberg proves to be subtly subversive in its well-observed and honest reflection of family life.

For her feature debut, director Axelle Ropert delivers a distinctive piece of cinema that combines the bleak melancholy of Alain Tanner’s work with the enigmatic poetry of Eric Rohmer.  Having introduced all the clichés that we associate with a film of this kind, Ropert cunningly turns them all on their head and, in doing so, reveals some startling truths about the relationships between family members.  The love that a father has for his wife and children is a complex beast that has eluded many a writer and filmmaker, but Ropert gets surprisingly close to the heart of the matter, assisted by her leading man, François Damiens, and her inspired cinematographer Céline Bozon, who both bring a stark infusion of hibernal sadness to the film.

A hugely popular comedian in his native Belgium, François Damiens has recently made his breakthrough into French cinema with mainstream comedies such as La Personne aux deux personnes (2008) and 15 ans et demi (2008).   In La Famille Wolberg, he is cast against type and proves that he is equally capable of taking on straight dramatic roles.  In his best screen performance to date, Damiens is spellbinding as the father whose world is slowly collapsing around him but who somehow finds the courage to fight on and protect those nearest to him, encouraged not by his Jewish faith but by the legendary African American soul musicians he has come to idolise. 

On paper, Simon Wolberg may look like a walking cliché, but Damiens makes him an inordinately complex and charismatic individual, as contradictory and surprising as the film itself.  He realises too late that his will never be the ideal family that he hankers after, although he finds some kind of salvation when he realises the fallacy of his delusions and learns to accept life as it is.  With some equally arresting contributions from a talented supporting cast (including Jocelyn Quivrin, who tragically died in a car accident a few weeks before the film was released), La Famille Wolberg offers a poignant dissection of a family in crisis and a father coming to terms with the failure of his dreams.  This is what becomes of the broken hearted...

© James Travers 2010

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