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Love Thy Father review
:. Director: Jacob Berger
:. Starring: Gérard Depardieu, Guillaume Depardieu
:. Running Time: 1:40
:. Year: 2001
:. Country: France
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Gérard Depardieu's life is strangely echoed in Love Thy Father, a heavy work about the tumultuous relationship between a writer and his son. Depardieu is Léo Shepherd, a famous author who on his way to Stockholm to pick up his Nobel prize, gets into a motorbike accident and is then kidnapped by his son, Paul (Guillaume Depardieu) who has been following him. The two embark on a long journey through Northern Europe, an odyssey of guilt and anger where Paul tries to confront his dad. His sister (Sylvie Testud) later joins them, forming a doomed trio headed by the mythical fatherly figure.
According to writer/director Jacob Berger, the film was based in part on his relationship with his father, a famous British writer from the 70's but, involuntarily or not, Love Thy Father functions as a mirror putting the audience in the role of voyeurs feeding on Depardieu and son's real-life drama. Just like in the movie—or rather vice versa—, the actor had a tumultuous relationship with his son Guillaume (who also had a drug problem) and got into a serious motorbike accident. The casting of Sylvie Testud hits close to home as she bears a troubling resemblance to Depardieu's daughter Elizabeth. As the barriers between life, art and inspiration become blurry, Love Thy Father gets caught in its own game, as the film gets cannibalized by Gérard and Guillaume's haunting performances that border on real-life.
Here Gérard plays a calm and strong figure, an egotistic artist who has gone through life guided by his own talent and in the process has sacrificed his entourage and family. Paul, like Guillaume himself, is a young incarnation of Gérard: rough, volatile and incandescent. The violent relationship between the two characters in which they seem to have a mutual fear of each other is left unexplained. One can however perceive that Léo sees himself in Paul and feels challenged by his talent, another parallel with the Depardieu legacy, as Guillaume has made a name of his own.
As the child of a celebrity, Berger built Love Thy Father as a testimony to the difficulty of living in the shadow of a well-known father. Haunted by a struggle to establish his own identity and motivated by a thirst for personal achievement, this second directing effort is a sincere attempt to Be. However, the result, this film, isn't convincing.
Filled with pedantic dialogues and affected poses, Love Thy Father aspires to be a psycho-analytic and auto-reflexive drama but deflates as a pretentious work. Exploiting the notorious vibrancy of his actors, Berger traps us between various explosions of anger, from Guillaume Depardieu and Testud. At the same time Paul runs away from his life and family and Gérard from the kind of roles that made his reputation 40 years ago. In Love Thy Father, characters are monolithic, only expressing themselves through anger or cowardly escape. But the main cause of Berger's failure to convince us of his full-fleshed existence as an artist might lie in the very title and theme of his film. Love Thy Father, just like his child-of-a-celebrity life, stays in the shadow of the father figure, the director embracing what he tries to escape from, reminding us exactly with what he wants us to forget. Equipped with a wrong sense of purpose, the picture ends up disappearing behind its stars, a powerful father and son duo too strong for their own sake.
There are two ways to deal with that tormenting syndrome of surviving a famous relative. One is straightforward, trying to make a first name, a path Guillaume Depardieu and Vincent Cassel (of Irréversible & Brotherhood of the Wolf's fame and the son of French actor Jean-Pierre Cassel) have successfully taken. The other one is making a detour, which also works as Nicholas Cage can attest. In both cases, the only real denominator is talent.
Fred Thom
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