Mon père est ingénieur (2004) - film review

After suffering a traumatic experience, Natacha is left in a partially comatose state, unable to communicate with anyone, not even her father.  Only a few days ago, she was full of life, an active paediatrician in a poor district of Marseilles and a militant Communist fighting against racial intolerance and the deportation of immigrants.  Hearing of her condition, her former boyfriend, Jérémie, takes time out from his important government job to be with her.  He recalls their happy times together and hopes desperately that one day she will return to him, in body and in mind...

In common with many of Robert Guédiguian’s more recent films, Mon père est ingénieur suffers from an excess of artistic self-indulgence and an over abundance of themes which fail to add up to a coherent whole.  The film is, in true Guédiguian style, beautifully shot in his native Marseilles and has a beguiling poetic quality which sustains the spectator’s interest and sympathy.  However, it fails to have the impact of his earlier great films, such as Marius et Jeannette (1997) and À la place du coeur (1998), which were far less artistically self-conscious, had much greater narrative simplicity, and were hence much more effective.  

The film has a great deal of charm and poignancy, thanks largely to some stirring performances from Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Ariane Ascaride, but suffers from one major flaw.  It is hard to reconcile the realism and sincerity of the film’s everyday situations with the toe-curling, overly sentimentalised sequences recounting the Nativity.  You might argue that the artificiality of these sequences is justified in that they represent what is in the mind of the film’s traumatised heroine, but even taking that on board they still appear painfully at odds with the rest of what we see.   Had these scenes been excised or shot in a more subdued and realist manner, with less of the phoney brotherhood-of-man sentimentality, Mon père est ingénieur could very well have been Guédiguian’s most satisfying film to date.

© James Travers 2008

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