Killing me softly

COMMENT J'AI TUE MON PERE (2002) France

Don't be put off by the title (The way I killed my father). This film is more subtle than it sounds and after I'd seen it, I found myself reflecting on the questions concealed within the title.

The central character is a successful 40-year-old man, Jean-Luc, who has followed in his father's footsteps by pursuing a medical career. In other ways, however, he has been unable to follow in his father's footsteps - because his father suddenly walked out on the family years before and went to Africa, vanishing from their lives. In the film, the father Maurice returns unexpectedly (with ambiguous motives) and the effect of his presence on Jean-Luc builds, slowly but inexorably, to a painful finale.

As well as this central confrontation between father and son, the film explores the relationships between Maurice and Jean-Luc's wife, Isa, and younger brother Patrick. The result is an unhurried study of the nature of family ties and the heredity (or otherwise) of personality, which makes space for the complexity - or opacity - of the characters' actions.

Jean-Luc tries to make the 'appropriate' gestures towards Maurice on one level - offering him an allowance, for example, when he guesses Maurice has no pension provision. But he does this because he can afford it, he insists, not because he feels he should. The sense of obligation is a key theme in the film. Maurice later tells Jean-Luc he does not feel obliged to love him. He also observes how clumsy they are when trying to interact. What is 'natural', the film asks, for them to feel or do? Should the father feel remorse for having left? How should the sons react to his return to their lives?

At one point, Maurice seems to dismiss his role in their development, extolling the importance of being a self-made man. Jean-Luc asserts - with some bitterness - that he doesn't believe in roots. While we sense the irony of his comment, Maurice agrees, emphasising the importance of where you end up settling, rather than where you came from, in determining who you are.

Patrick cannot suppress his sense of rejection and hurt as much as Jean-Luc. The film is peppered with increasingly haunted monologues where he describes memories of being deserted by Maurice, of his father being a stranger to him. The film explores how childhood memories are carried into later life as vivid shards of character, almost myths, in their ability to impact on adults despite all the time and change since. It raises the question of how an adult can process, or accommodate, these memories when they are brought to the fore again by events.

Maurice develops a close relationship with the beautiful and constrained Isa, and this exposes the tensions and rifts in her marriage. Jean-Luc is jealous of them, just as he feels excluded by the bond between Maurice and a young doctor he mentored in Africa. The fact that Jean-Luc and Isa have no children takes on an inevitable and revealing significance.

Comment j'ai tue mon pere tackles norms of family and fatherhood, the consequences of abandonment, and much more besides without simplifying or moralising. It is for the most part a wonderfully acted and fascinating film which leaves you with plenty to think about. 'It's hell being your son,' hisses Jean-Luc to Maurice in one exchange. But how did he kill his father? No, of course I'm not telling...

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