The Quiet Son (Jouer avec le feu) | 2024 Venice Film Festival Review

Father Knows Best: The Coulin Sisters Examine the Detrimental Ripples of Fascism

With their third feature, The Quiet Son, French directing duo Delphine and Muriel Coulin (who are also sisters) explore the effects of extremism on a radicalized teenager from a working class suburban French family. In many ways, the trajectory of their filmography is similar to that of the Dardenne Bros., utilizing social realism to explore situations seemingly ripped from the headlines, such as their debut 17 Girls (2011), which also features a group teenagers getting together to make their own rash, cult-like decisions which have far-reaching effects they cannot comprehend. Their latest venture explores something even more troubling through the microcosm of one family dealing with a disillusioned and hopeless teenager who responds positively to the false sense of security offered by young men his own age already indoctrinated by the hate-speak of the far right. To date, it is the directors’ least melodramatic scenario, despite the nature of the subject, and is bolstered by yet another moving Vincent Lindon performance, who seems to have been indubitably solidified as the go to working class everyman of modern French cinema.

Pierre (Lindon) is a single father supporting two sons in a suburb outside of Paris. His wife died some years prior, and in some ways none of them have ever really gotten over that. His eldest, twenty-two-year-old Felix, or “Fus,” as everyone likes to call him, is an avid soccer player who dropped out of his technical program before receiving a degree in metallurgy. Younger brother Louis (Stefan Crepon) is quietly fastidious, graduating high school and eyeing a plum opportunity at university. When a family friend approaches Pierre about Fus engaged with a group of radical youths putting up extremist propaganda posters, he’s furious. But confronting Fus makes him realize his eldest seems emotionally committed to this new group of toxic friends. For a while, Fus is forced to move out, but he returns, promising he won’t correspond with them any longer. Until one day, he’s discovered at home badly injured, requiring a stint in the hospital and several months of physical therapy and recuperation. Pierre believes Fus learned his lesson. And then an irreversible tragedy happens.

While we’ve seen quite a few films, including French language films, dealing with this exact same scenario, most presentations deal with the aftermath of carnage inflicted by radicalized children. Delphine and Muriel Coulin present something similar to Andre Techine’s Farewell the Night (2019), in which a grandmother played by Catherine Deneuve discovers similar information about her grandson, and tries to foil his plans. What’s also curious about The Quiet Son is it fixates on a rather unfussy portrayal of a single father, widowed years prior, raising two teenage sons on his own. The title refers to a comparison between the children, the younger son, Louis, evidence of successful parenting with his education, invited to attend the Sorbonne.

It’s a slow build to turmoil, and what many parents may be able to relate to is how difficult it is to not only communicate, but essentially, turn the beat around with kids who have found a sense of community or identity they’ve been unable to experience anywhere else. This is exactly what makes the troubling rise in fascism and extremism among contemporary youths incredibly pervasive, considering a new generation has been reared almost exclusively online, the antithesis of human connection and intimacy. The directors don’t go into explicit details about what Felix and his friends are getting up to or the rhetoric they’re choosing to employ, which anticipates a bit of tension. How far gone is Felix? In many ways, he acts the way he always did in front of family, loving and supportive where it counts, which makes it even more difficult for Pierre to broach the subject.

An inevitable event transpires from which Felix nor his family will ever be the same, an abrupt jump made to feel exactly as it would in life, a dreadful point of no return. This leads to Lindon expertly relaying a monologue of a parent, who in simple terms, struggles to tell a French court of law how he feels about what happened. It’s one of several key sequences where it actually feels hard to imagine anyone else but Lindon in this performance, much like most of his work with Stephane Brize, particularly The Measure of a Man (2015), or even Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021), where a mix of stoicism and emotion collide in his delivery. Some of the finest moments are between Pierre and his sons, when he lets his guard down, and shares an intimacy not often seen between fathers and sons. Which is also what makes the situation so confusing. How can Pierre, as a loving parent, explain what happened to Felix?

Voison, recently of Ozon’s Summer of 85 (2020) and Xavier Giannoli’s Lost Illusions (2021) and Crepon, of Ozon’s Peter von Kant (2022), both give believable performance as Lindon’s sons, though we don’t really have any time to dig into their characters beyond reactions to their current situation. The film is based on a novel by Laurent Petitmangin, but the approach of the film seems to be calibrated for parents having to grapple with an impossible dilemma. While The Quiet Son doesn’t sermonize, it’s unveiled in a clear-cut, straightforward manner which doesn’t suggest there’s any real answer for prevention. Instead, as is often the case, it’s about humans having to deal with picking up the pieces.

Reviewed on September 4th at the 2024 Venice Film Festival (81st edition) – In Competition section. 110 Minutes.

★★★/☆☆☆☆☆