Father of My Children
Father of My Children Chiara Caselli, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Alice de Lencquesaing Director: Mia Hansen-Love
Based on the last days of French film producer Humbert Balsan - who was famed for his dedication to ushering commercially risky alternative cinema to fruition, a challenging task that led to his suicide in 2005 - Father of My Children is at once a humane and perceptive portrait of a crisis-stricken man, and an invigorating exploration of the choppy waters of independent film production.
Mia Hansen-Love, the last of Balsan's proteges, has delivered a tribute to her mentor and the art he represents with attention to detail and emotional nuances. It's pleasantly devoid of the sweeping melodrama an unsure hand might bring to what was a dramatic life.
The film begins with a brilliant sequence in which producer Gregoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) criss-crosses Paris in his element. He wheels and deals on the phone as he contends with impossible Georgian producers, a visiting Korean film crew and a Swedish enfant terrible whose eccentric working methods are bleeding his company dry. His underlings flood him with enquiries - his long-suffering wife, Sylvia (Chiara Caselli), calls him 'human spam' - but his upbeat veneer stays intact, his true feelings only seeping through when he says he'd like to hear 'something nice' from people.
It's a yearning that heralds the unravelling of Gregoire's life. He struggles to attend to the emotional needs of his wife and three daughters, as a holiday in Italy becomes yet another festival of long-distance calls, interspersed with the children's play mocking their father's frenetic lifestyle. As sympathy and camaraderie dry up, and debts take a toll, the inevitable arrives: the focus shifts to Sylvia as she takes over her husband's company in an effort to keep his vision alive, only to discover the harsh conditions he had to - and she now has to - deal with.
Hansen-Love's proximity to her subject (and subject matter) makes the whole story and its details authentic and convincing. Her brother, Igor, appears as her alter ego, playing one of the last young filmmakers to meet Gregoire. But Father of My Children is more than a homage to a friend. It's a well-crafted piece that reveals the passion of a true artist and how people such as Gregoire/Balsan defy the odds to make it work - and the frustrations that could drive them to hopelessness. Balsan would have been proud of the film.