Balancing a successful professional career with a full and happy private life is a familiar challenge for most. In Le Père de mes enfants, Mia Hansen-Løve takes this commonplace dilemma and turns it into a loving but bittersweet portrait of a family whose world comes apart under these conflicting strains.
Grégoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) is a happily wedded father of three young girls, an independent film producer who somehow manages to juggle the never-ending demands of his company with his domestic responsibilities. Married to his cellphone and chain-smoking his way through endless rounds of meetings and crises, he maintains his sense of humour despite incessant demands from the difficult Swedish auteur he has always wanted to produce and the arrival of a group from Korea doing preproduction work on a new film. In addition to massaging artistic egos, his job involves trying to keep one step ahead of his bank – and financing is always an interminable headache. When his wife, Sylvia (Chiara Caselli), insists that he join the family on an Italian holiday, Grégoire finds he can no longer maintain any sane balance. Returning to Paris, he confronts the biggest challenge of his career – with unexpected consequences.
Forced into making a tragic and irrevocable decision, Grégoire leaves his family and friends to pick up the pieces. This is where the film, under Hansen-Løve's firm guiding hand, accelerates in resonance and emotive power. Her world shattered, Sylvia struggles to both hold her family together and manage the artistic legacy that her husband fought so hard to carve out for himself. Drawing inspiration from the life of the well-known French producer Humbert Balsan, Hansen-Løve, a former actor, elicits powerful performances not just from de Lencquesaing and Caselli as the married couple, but also from those playing their three children and their extended family of friends and colleagues.
Neatly divided into two halves, each centred respectively on husband and wife, Le Père de mes enfants confirms Hansen-Løve as a superb portraitist of family, and she adeptly illustrates the complex web of emotions and dependencies that come into daily play.
Piers Handling
Mia Hansen-Løve began her film career as an actress in the films
Fin août, début septembre (98) and
Les Destinées sentimentales (00) by Olivier Assayas. She has since written for
Cahiers du cinéma and directed numerous short films. Her feature films include
Tout est pardonné (06) and
Le Père de mes enfants (09).