Mon fils à moi (2007) - film review

Julien is adored by his mother.  He is the centre of her world.  Nothing can rival the love that she has for him.  But too much love can be a dangerous thing...  As he makes the transition from childhood to adolescence, Julien no longer appreciates his mother’s over-attentiveness.  He finds it intrusive, overpowering, embarrassing.  He wants to experience the freedom that his friends at school enjoy.  He wants to have a girlfriend, visit his beloved grandmother whenever he chooses, to live as an ordinary teenager.  But his mother is not prepared to give him up.  Julien will always be her little boy.  Julien’s father is too wrapped up in his work at the university to notice his wife’s increasing hostility towards their son.  The only one to notice how miserable Julien has become is his older sister, but what can she do?  In the end, Julien can no longer endure his mother’s tyranny of love...

Martial Fougeron’s directorial debut feature is this harrowing depiction of child abuse, a stark social drama which is all the more potent because of its cosy bourgeois setting.   Mon fils à moi reminds us that the ill-treatment of children is not confined to the housing estates and that over-protective parenting can be just as harmful as wilful neglect.  This is not a comfortable film to watch – scenes of children being intimidated and beaten by their parents are never easy to stomach.  But it is true to life and compelling, convincingly presenting one of the scenarios in which child abuse can arise in a domestic situation.   

Fougeron’s understated yet adept direction prevents the film from drifting off into laboured didacticism or mawkish sentimentality, whilst the robust performances – particularly those of the leads Nathalie Baye and Victor Sévaux – give the film its gut-wrenching realism and subtle pathos.   As the brutalised teenager, Sévaux has something of the quality that the young Jean-Pierre Léaud showed in Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups (1959), an indomitable spirit shining through a vulnerable waif-like exterior.

What is perhaps most extraordinary about this film is Nathalie Baye’s portrayal of the mother.  In several scenes, she plays the part with an almost sadistic cruelty and the character at times has all the characteristics of a dangerous psychopath, eyeing her son with the hungry look of a tigress contemplating her next meal.  Yet, in other scenes, Baye is surprisingly poignant, showing us that her character is not a villain, but a victim – a sad, emotionally immature woman whose obsessive need for affection has made her into a monster.

We are reminded of the grim fact is that the majority of those whose abuse children have no notion of the harm they are perpetrating when they inflict mental and psychological torture on their young victims.  Rather, it is Olivier Gourmet’s character - the passive, seemingly well-balanced father – who is the real villain of the piece.  He personifies the callous indifference of those who witness abuse but refuse to get involved, thereby allowing the cycle of abuse and suffering to perpetuate itself from one generation to the next.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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