Les Grandes personnes (2008) - film review

To celebrate his daughter Jeanne’s 17th birthday, Albert, a divorced librarian, takes her to the Swedish island Styrsö for their summer holiday.  Of course, he has an ulterior motive for choosing this particular island.  Equipped with the best metal detector that money can buy, Albert sets about looking for the lost treasure of the famous Viking Jon-Olof Vitfoen.  His well-planned holiday follows a completely different course when he gets to know Christine, a friend of his landlady...

Anne Novion makes an auspicious directorial debut with this bittersweet comedy-drama that revolves around the conflict between cultures and generations.  Influenced by New Wave director Jacques Rozier, Novion crafts a film that is both uplifting and melancholic, in which the serene Swedish location exposes and accentuates the inner turmoil within the main protagonists, a father and his teenage daughter, as they both attempt to navigate a crisis point in their lives.  The daughter’s burgeoning adolescence makes the father aware of his own childishness and compels him to make a similar transition to adulthood, allowing him to assume the responsibilities of fatherhood and rediscover meaning in his life.  Les Grandes personnes is a film which gently reminds us that the growing up process is not one that ends in the wake of adolescence but is one that continues throughout life.

Much of the film’s charm and emotional power stem from the contributions from its first-rate cast, which is headed by the incomparable Jean-Pierre Darroussin, who is perfect in the role of the father who is struggling to emerge from a retarded adolescence.  Darroussin’s talent for playing seemingly naïve characters of a sensitive nature is put to good use here and is well-complemented by Anaïs Demoustier’s wise-beyond-her-years, yet still vulnerable, teenager,  The rapport between Darroussin and Demoustier convincingly suggests the strained tensions between a father and his adolescent daughter and provides the basis for much of the film’s humour and melancholic introspection.   With its delicate yet assured mise en scène, incisive screenplay and spellbinding performances, Les Grandes personnes is an engaging piece that explores the fraught father-daughter relationship with tenderness, humour and a certain amount of irony.

© filmsdefrance.com 2010

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