How I Killed My Father (2001)

Touches You

best movie i've ever seen.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

A psychological drama about a father who disappears and dies years later. His son a successful doctor imagines what it would be like if his father had returned in a reverie.This movie explores the pain caused by absent parents and the scars they leave.Beautifully filmed but I found the actor playing the doctor son (the father is also a doctor) and his brother were distorted looking (on purpose?). They look like vampires or 50s space aliens.The film is interrupted by boring not funny monologues by the brother who apparently works as a stand up comedian (in the reverie only I imagine) delivering monologues about the father--this is a plot device that falls flat and ruins rather than helps things. It seems gimmicky.The film is OK... will not affect you deeply like it is supposed to though. Some how it just doesn't quite work? The comedian part is gimmicky and backfires.

In 1997, Anne Fontaine made an idiosyncratic film named "Nettoyage à Sec" in which a mysterious young man, Loïc shattered the upstart world of a couple of dry cleaners. Miou-Miou acted the woman while Charles Berling was her husband. Four years later, the female filmmaker finds again her main actor for a very similar role and a film which resembles its 1997 companion.Here, the disruptive element isn't a young man but an elderly one acted by Michel Bouquet in a mind-boggling performance. After many years spent in research in Africa, he unexpectedly resurfaces in France to pay a visit to his sons. Berling is a doctor who has everything to be happy: a private hospital that works well, a lascivious mansion and a lovely spouse (Natacha Régnier) and he even saved from distress his brother whom he hired as his chauffeur. Is this posh universe serendipitous? Bouquet's presence will reveal the other side of this lush scenery as well as many things about his past, Berling's and his brother's. A good proportion of these secrets have something eerie and are likely to explain the current situation.As soon as Bouquet arrives, Anne Fontaine exudes an unnerving climate and keeps a low-key tonality to better capture a high disquiet. Rather than to deliver banal explanations that would have rushed the film towards miscarriage, she prefers to call upon the viewer's imagination and to let the unsaid prevail to interpret the numerous zones of shadow and ambiguity the characters have deep down inside them. What also cements her talent is that she eschews a good number of easy moments in which the characters' reactions would have been so predictable. Distance is her key word to shoot her characters and she sends away the father and his son without pronouncing in favor of either even if she has an ounce of sympathy at the tail end when they feel lost.Once again, Michel Bouquet's acute look and ubiquity are to be praised. He just has to pronounce a cue with his hoarse voice to fill one sequence with intensity. Berling and Régnier are up to scratch him. With Marion Vernoux and a few other ones, Anne Fontaine may be the finest French female filmmaker of these last years. Perhaps one will just regret this detail: Bouquet sees his son again when the latter is at the peak of his success and invites the whole community at his home. This trick has been used many times before.

"My Father and I", as the DVD was entitled, spends its time examining the emotional erosion of an icy, controlling, stilted, and successful Gerontologist upon the return of the father who abandoned him as a child. A well presented psychodrama with a solid cast, good production value, and a meager storyline, this film tells its tale of gathering rage cloaked in polite conversation through nuances of body language, behavior, and minimal dialogue. Subtitled and ambiguous in beginning and end, "My Father and I" was well received by both critics and public the public at large given allowances for subtitles. Recommended for French film fans into psychodramas. (B+)

The last opus of Anne Fontaine is a combination of two influences: Oedipus complex and Nettoyage A Sec (Fontaine's previous film).What it takes from the Oedipus story is of course the conflictual relationship between Charles Berling (the son) and Michel Bouquet (the father), and how Berling tries to 'kill' his father to affirm his own identity. From Nettoyage A Sec, the film takes his structure: how a seemingly ideal couple (Berling and Regnier) copes with the unexpected intrusion of the father.If it were just for the acting, How I killed my Father would deserve a 10. Bouquet and Berling share an astounding intimacy on screen which interestingly happened off the set as well (they wrote a book of thoughts together just after the shoot). Regnier is surprisingly convincing in the beautiful up-class wife; what a versatility after her role in the Dreamlife of Angels when she was a young insecure squatter. However there is no special twist in the storyline, like one which made Nettoyage A Sec so disturbing...To sum up, a good acting piece which failed to deliver in the drama.