Un monde à nous (2008) - film review

Marc and his young son Noé arrive in a new town, hoping to begin a new life.  Noé starts a new school, where he makes new friends, but his father continues to put him through intensive training in combat sports.  Since the death of Noé’s mother, father and son have been on the run – but from what...?

For his second full-length film, French director Frédéric Balekdjian follows his bleak crime drama Les Mauvais joueurs (2005) with this equally sombre portrayal of an intense father-son relationship.  With most of the drama presented from the perspective of the central child protagonist, Un monde à nous feels like a film noir flavoured fairy tale, in which the boundary between reality and fantasy is merged to such an extent that we can never be certain whether the father’s paranoid anxieties have any basis in reality.  This is a genuinely disturbing film, and one which will change forever your reaction to The Supremes’ hit single "Baby Love"...

Balekdjian, bravely, cast his own son, Anton, in the role of the child lead, playing opposite Edouard Baer, who has become a leading light of French cinema in recent years.  Both actors are a revelation in this film.  Anton Balekdjian had appeared in just one film prior to this – Djamel Bensalah’s spoof western Big City (2007) – but already looks as though he might be a future star.  There is a brooding intensity and brutality to his and Baer’s performances which make their characters totally convincing participants in a bizarre game of survival, in an austere world that threatens to destroy their relationship.

Un monde à nous is striking in its originality, compelling with its subtle dark poetry, but it is by no means faultless.  Some of the direction appears heavy handed and prone to cliché in a few scenes, whilst the camerawork occasionally looks as if the technicians were trying a little too hard to achieve a raw cinéma vérité look.  However, thanks largely to the arresting contributions of its principal actors, Un monde à nous is film that has much to commend it.  The first person perspective allows it to exert a strange hold on the spectator, drawing us into a dark world in which a father and his son are bound to one another by an disquieting mix of fear and love.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?