La Fille prodigue (1981)
Directed by Jacques Doillon

Film Review

La Fille prodigue is the most provocative of Jacques Doillon's films and possibly one of the most difficult to engage with - inevitably so as it deals with one of cinema's last great taboos - incest.  The film follows a series of intimate and revealing portraits about childhood and adolescence on which Doillon's early reputation was founded - Les Doigts dans la tête (1974), Un sac de billes (1975), La Drôlesse (1979) - and represents a continuation of the themes of these early films, notably an individual's acceptance of his or her identity.  As befits its controversial subject matter, La Fille prodigue is much bleaker in tone and more ambiguous - indeed, there is a sense throughout the film that Doillon was himself uncomfortable with the subject and perhaps a little reluctant to get too close to it.

This was the first film that Jacques Doillon made with his partner at the time, Jane Birkin, who would take the lead role in his next film, La Pirate (1984), another taboo breaker that dealt with lesbianism.  At the time, Birkin was still best known for her many association with the singer-actor-director Serge Gainsbourg, so Doillon's film gave her a timely opportunity to move on and establish her solo career as a serious dramatic actress.  The role of Anne in La Fille prodigue - a sexually confused young woman who has long been tormented by her physical attraction to her father - was a gift for the 34 year-old Birkin, and Doillon appears to have written the part with her in mind.  In some scenes, the younger Birkin is clearly visible and she could easily pass for an adolescent - the manipulative kind that enjoys playing with people as if they were dolls.  In other scenes, Birkin is very much the mature woman, the deeply introspective kind you would expect to find in an Ingmar Bergman film, enmeshed in her private neuroses and tenebrous fantasies.

Now well into the mature phase of his career, Michel Piccoli is equally well suited for the role of Birkin's father - it's not hard to see why Jacques Rivette subsequently cast the two actors as husband and wife in La Belle noiseuse (1991).  The on-screen rapport between Piccoli and Birkin is rich and fascinating, expressing far more than Doillon's sparse and often unfathomable dialogue.  What begins as fairly banal interplay between a slightly estranged father and daughter gradually develops into something far more unsettling, and if we are troubled by what we see this is because of Birkin and Piccoli's contribution.  Such is the authenticity of the central performances that it is easy to discern the turmoil that lies beneath the implausibly placid surface, and to feel the pain as two troubled characters come to accept the reality of their mutual attraction and thereby find a way through their present impasse.  La Fille prodigue is perhaps too mannered and reserved for its own good and ultimately it fails to have the impact of Doillon's other, more fully developed intimate character studies, but it is nonetheless a brave and beguiling film - possibly a career highpoint for Jane Birkin.

Film Synopsis

Anne is a young woman who, in a fit of depression, leaves her husband Jean-Marie and chooses to live alone in a shoebox Parisian apartment.  Concerned over their daughter's deteriorating mental state, Anne's parents invite her to stay with them at their ample country house on the Normandy coast.   Anne is surprised when her mother confides in her that her father has fallen in love with another woman, a dancer.  With her mother away from home to tend to her other daughter, who is about to give birth at any moment, Anne strikes up an acquaintance with her father's new love interest and invites her to dinner one evening.  Over the days that follow, Anne's relationship with her father becomes increasingly strained and she ends by persuading him to accompany her back to her apartment.  In this confined space, suppressed longings suddenly break free and Anne finally fulfils her dark fantasy - to submit to being seduced by her own father...