My Son (2006)

Too much of everything

Fantastic!

Did you people see the same film I saw?

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Believable heart wrenching horrible unhealthy story about a mother too much in love with her son, smothering him with over-protection, and going even further. 12 year old Julien had his mother as best friend, or rather the opposite. He is his mother's best friend. She does not know when to let go, and she does not know when to give him the needed space, not understanding growing up and going into puberty, and the trauma the boy feels by this.Extremely well played by the two main persons. The mother is a mother from hell, played by a frightening Nathalie Baye. The father is ignorant to what goes on, being distant as many are. Julien, brilliantly played by Victor Sevaux, tries all he can to get away from home for a day or two, trying to make his mother love him less. It's painful to watch. When his sisters addresses that Julien is not happy and well, she is ignored.When mother finds a love letter to her son in the mail from his girlfriend Alice, she opens it with no hesitation, and reacts as jealous as it's possible to do. The sister tells, and he finds the letter shred to pieces in the junk. He's not allowed to do anything without the mother approving and telling in beforehand. And when he decides to show appreciation, she reacts like a psycho.But after a while Julien is driven into a corner, and decides to act...

a mother. her family. and her son. scenes from a war. picture of a disorganized family. more than a film, a scale of tension, emotions, desires. because the possessive mother, the disobedient son, the absent father are only masks of a society. the refuges - football, grand mother piano lessons, the girl friend , career are fragile refuges. essence - nuances of fear. the fear of mother for future failure of Julien. the fear of father front of every day events. the fear of son , like fear of each teenager to be out of circle. and the seed of fear - different definition of love. nothing else. only a precise beautiful performance of each actor and the subtle picture of each piece of crisis. a cold movie. but suitable for everyday bruises.

SPOILERS (with references to "Play Misty for Me", "The Manchurian Candidate", "Don't Look Now" and "Psycho 2" that could also contain spoilers)Cineasts seem besotted by "top ten" lists; ten greats, ten worst, ten desert island favourites; I could go on...However, by way of introduction to "Mon Fils a Moi" allow me to suggest another category; the greatest human monsters in cinema. Rather than boring you with ten, I've chosen a small group that I think are about the best. Possibly as I am male, it is the female ones that intrigue me the most. It was so much more unnerving to experience Clint Eastwood being pursued by a female slasher in "Play Misty for Me" than all those women fleeing deranged men with knives in endless dark house movies. And how about Donald Sutherland's fate at the hands of the dwarf in the red mac in "Don't Look Now", almost the only film that still really terrifies me, having got used to the terror in the Clint Eastwood work which is more a tragedy of unrequited love than a horror flick. Which brings me to the classification of the female monster into two broad types, the evil and the sick. The greatest of the evil must surely be Angela Lansbury in "The Manchurian Candidate" for whom no act could be too despicable in her pursuit of political and even world domination. I had always thought Jessica Walter in "Misty" the greatest of the sickos but can now record that she has been equalled by Nathalie Baye in a recent off-beat French work "Mon Fils a Moi" by Martial Fougeron, a director new to me. This is a minor but completely engrossing vignette of a dysfunctional family, all the more claustrophobic for being mainly confined to a small group of characters, mum, dad, adolescent daughter and son just entering puberty. They live in a respectable detached house in a quiet residential part of a provincial town. Dad is a college teacher, Mum a housewife, daughter about to go on to higher education and son just a boy, albeit not doing too well at school. As the film progresses we quickly realise that the boy's condition is far from normal. Not only are his grades bad but he is off his food. Almost from the beginning there are many telltale signs that the problem is Mum. Her pathological love of the boy is about to result in the disintegration of the family as she attempts to stifle every sign of his adolescent development. The more the boy tries to distance himself the more the mother retaliates by forcing him to relinquish his interests one by one. Eventually he is left in an almost empty room with nothing he can call his own. Even his beloved piano has been taken away by removal men. There is a particularly poignant moment where he uses his knees as a dummy keyboard. The daughter is the only one to retaliate on her brother's behalf but she hasn't the strength to cope with Mum's viciousness. Dad's defence mechanism is to ignore everything going on around him by immersing himself in work, but even he can hardly bear his wife's callousness after a party the boy attends against her wishes. Olivier Gourmet is particularly fine in his uncharacteristic part of a weakling. How true to type is his almost inevitable apology after delivering her a single blow. The director paces the film with the assuredness of a master. The increase in tension through gradually notching up the level of violence is the stuff of the truly outstanding psychological thriller. How will it all end? Just how much more can the son take before he snaps? Suffice to say that this must have have been one of the most extraordinarily difficult films to end without going over the top into melodrama. All the more reason to admire the last line in which Mum is quoted as saying she she has forgiven her son. Nathalie Baye's superb performance would suggest just the opposite, that there is no ending, and, as Norman Bates says in "Psycho 2", it could all start up again.

Turning the page from childhood into adolescence, Julien seems to be a very happy child with lots of things to do. A straight 20 (that's A) student, a football player in the team that is preparing its next championship, a dedicated pupil of his own granny who teaches him piano and loves him dearly; a happy child starting a relationship with a girl at school.With passionate and memorable performances of all the cast, definitely Nathalie Baye leads the pack with a terrific impersonation of Julien's mother. A pity this time Olivier Gourmet had a small but very effective role as the father. Marie Kremer as Julien's sister is fantastic, but Victor Sévaux as Julien is one of the best roles played by a child I've ever seen. He reminded me the amazing character of Ken Loach's "Kes" or the powerful performance of Christian Bale in "The Empire of the Sun", or, maybe closer in time, Juanjo Ballesta in "El Bola", a film that deals with the subject matter of Mon Fils à Moi.The script is written in the same vein as some of the Dardenne's brothers films: fast cuts into expressions that tell even the text in the mind of the characters. Mme. Baye's character is mesmerising, to say the least. One difficult role to play as a deranged over-protecting mother that relies in her power to determine her son's fate. Absolutely diabolical and very disturbing.This is a film that has the power of moving every fibre in your mind and heart, even physically. There is one scene of incredible tension that leads to the not so expected end where you will feel how your heart-rate increases dramatically.Shot with lots of natural light and intelligent camera angles and movements, it never lets you go. A beautiful, difficult to watch film that will stay with you for a long time... and I mean it, it's just too hard to see when love is turned into slavery and that slavery is justified as love.These are the kind of films that have a brave approach to difficult subjects and give you the opportunity to discuss it many times.