Our Children (French: À perdre la raison), 2012.
Directed by Joachim Lafosse.
Starring Niels Arestrup, Tahar Rahim, Émilie Dequenne, Stéphane Bissot, Mounia Raoui and Redouane Behache.
SYNOPSIS:
A young woman struggles with depression as her four children, husband and father in-law’s personal demands take a toll.
After leaving the screening for Our Children, I wondered how people could stand around chatting and joking after seeing what I’d just seen (the film as well as my t-shirt that features Che Guevara wearing a Che t-shirt, I mean, makes you think, doesn’t it?). Our Children is quite affecting, is what I’m trying to say. Not that I cried, come on, I’m a bloke; I save my crying for when a ball goes in a net or a hole or when a dog does something heroic.
But enough self effacing, let’s start at the beginning. The film in terms of how the story’s told is done very well. Regular jumps forward in time keeps things interesting, but never confusing as to where the characters are in their lives. It’s like picking up a book you’ve read a hundred times and at the end of every chapter skipping ahead a few. Somehow you know what’s happened in between and the story just carries on.
The dialogue is a bit on the nose, at times, though I’m not sure if this was the screenwriter’s decision or down to the guy doing the subtitles. While there weren’t any glaring errors (character says ‘bonjour’, subtitles say ‘halibut’), I know enough French to know it wasn’t a literal translation. Which means a film’s dialogue, if translated for an ignorant person (i.e. me), can’t really be critiqued in any way (even though I just did, if you start the paragraph again).
I heard Our Children was going to be a tragedy and assumed melodrama abound. So what worked for me was the realistic way everything was dealt with. Murielle (Dequenne) falls into a depression that is all at once nonsensical, understandable and misunderstood. She quickly becomes a shell of her former self and doesn’t know what to do with herself.
The depression goes hand in hand with the demands her family puts on her. Her husband’s demanding, whilst her father in-law has a way of fixing things without letting other people know how he did it. While this is a helpful quality in the context of a young family getting used to constantly being with each other, it quickly turns into a negative as Murielle’s distrust of him grows while he tries to help her as best he can.
You feel her mood as she falls into this endless cycle of hopelessness. This all makes her life, and the movie itself, quite slow, but not in a way that made the running time feel long. The depressing feeling throughout, and the frankly grim ending, all makes sense in the context of the movie, making the ending one of the most affecting things I’ve seen on screen, also because it is so underplayed as opposed to a brash operatic depression.
Émilie Dequenne’s performance, falling into a hole of depression, alongside her demanding husband (Rahim) and ‘scheming’ father in-law (Arestrup) are central to why this movie works at all. Without her and the sympathy felt for her, none of this movie would matter. All the performances are spot on as well, so it’s by no means a one-woman show.
Ultimately, Our Children works where others fail because it doesn’t try too hard. The things that happen are matter of fact in the way they’re presented, but the acting drew me in and made me that much more connected. The fact everything’s so emotive whilst being almost clinical in the way it cuts and shoots forward in time is juxtaposition that works to pull you in further. The movie’s an observation of different sections of this family’s life that we as an audience dip into, but everything seems so real that while you want to look away you just can’t.
Flickering Myth Rating: Film ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★ ★ ★
Matt Smith
Originally published October 18, 2012. Updated April 14, 2018.
