Penultimate film of Norwegian Joachim Trier, this is a movie that has some excellent features but fails to win you over in the long run. It’s basically about grief and absence and features the family of a famous French photojournalist
who dies in a mysterious car crash. Isabelle Huppert plays the lead and is somewhat underused but still manages to get a few moody looks in. Her big dilemma was life in the danger zone versus a quiet domestic life. Hubby is Gabriel Byrne, ex-actor
and now teacher who has brought up the two boys largely single-handed. We see him trying to handle life even three years after her death with a retrospective exhibition coming up and the admission by a colleague that he had an affair with Huppert. Eldest son, who had a close relationship with his mother
has never really got over the possibility that this death was suicide and as a new father is at a loss. Jesse Eisenberg is very much himself in this role.
Devin Druid plays the younger son Conrad who is right on the edge.
Locked in his room, spending hours online or writing slightly weird adolescent ravings, he lusts after a girl in his class who is a cheerleader in the local team, totally out of his range as the local nerd. His relationship with his father is zero
and little better with his brother
and he doesn’t know about his mother. And so, very slowly with beautiful photography and music Trier explores the three men and their handling of this grief that has never really had a chance to come out. We get some good scenes
and some authentic emotions in a very North American Anglo-Saxon style but there is quite a lot of work to do to get there.
♦♦♦ (just)
passionfilm 