Cannes 2009 Day 5: Picking up the Pieces in ‘Father of My Children’

Answering the question on how someone can take away their life due to a couple of bad business decisions, Mia Hansen-Løve‘s Le Père de mes enfants is a perhaps too real of an example to show at the Cannes Film Festival this year, especially with the current downturn in the biz. Many of the thing’s that the film’s loving, caring and extremely busy protagonist faces in the last days and hours of his life are collectively lived by many of the people watching the film. Its a film apart in the films about filmmaking sub-genre, but it also counts as an honest family portrait where the matriarch and her three girls pick up the pieces without the director aiming to make these characters as full fledged card caring members of loss, grief and mourning type. Working with the notion of fractured families once again, she was in Cannes two years back with her debut film (Tout est pardonne) that contains some of this, Hansen-Løve aims for an aesthetic, emotional and narrative truth – which only means that the story won’t come with a bow on it.