Review: Our Children (2012)

Cast: Émilie Dequenne, Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup
Director: Joachim Lafosse
Country: Belgium | Luxembourg | France | Switzerland
Genre: Drama
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Note: Our Children opens in limited release this Friday, August 2nd

“You’ll bury them in Morocco?” It’s a question asked twice, each time with visible strain—both physical and emotional—by the hospital bed-bound Murielle, whose pained face is our introduction to Our Children. It’s strange, the reverence we reserve for the corpse, despite its standing in so many cultures as but the discarded vessel of the spirit. How odd it is that the soil in which we lay it should be of such importance, how almost animalistic that we should think to return it to where we believe it belongs. It’s this strange sense of ownership and personal propriety that stands over this movie from its striking opening scene, skewing our perspective toward consideration of the many aspects that constitute our identity.

It’s a challenge of sorts, a problem put as much to the writers as to the audience, who—certainly in its native Belgium—should recognise the parallels to a headline-grabbing news item from 2007. Can such tragedy be explained, understood, excused even?

Of course, the mental shadow the scene casts is lesser in impact—immediate impact, at least—than the primal worry the words set in motion: someone is dead. That the film leaps back an unstated amount of time to find Murielle and her boyfriend Mounir marrying and beginning a family, then, constitutes a provocative move on the part of director Joachim Lafosse and his co-writers Thomas Bidegain and Matthieu Retnaert: knowing the destination, can we see the wrong turns in the journey? It’s a challenge of sorts, a problem put as much to the writers as to the audience, who—certainly in its native Belgium—should recognise the parallels to a headline-grabbing news item from 2007. Can such tragedy be explained, understood, excused even?

Instrumental to the film’s underlying obsession with identity is the relationship between Mounir, a medical student, and André, the family doctor who takes him—and gradually his wife and children too—under his wing and into his home. They are played, respectively, by Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup, whose fluid dynamic was the arguable crux of A Prophet. Bidegain played a part in the scripting of that film, and sinister shades of the relationship therein remain: there’s a scene where Mounir is told that “people are talking” about his arrangement with André. It’s this power balance, acting almost as a second marriage, on which the film is hinged, and from which the cracks begin to show. Yet what good is it to show these cracks, and to wait for the dam to burst? Lafosse’s film is like a jigsaw short of several pieces: we’ve seen the final image, but it’s beyond us to see how to get there.

Our Children, as it proceeds, does less to shed light on an unconscionable world than to provoke the despair it breeds.

It’s beyond the filmmakers too, and their story is a necessarily frustrated one; born of an act that is—arguably—beyond understanding, any effort to glean such understanding is doomed to only, at best, limited success. Our Children, as it proceeds, does less to shed light on an unconscionable world than to provoke the despair it breeds. It’s useful to compare the film to others like Haneke’s The Seventh Continent and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, both similarly lifted from seemingly incomprehensible tales of ordinary horror. In these films, the search for an “answer” belied a deeper probing into the machinations of modern society; the stories Haneke plucked were ciphers to other issues, conduits to problems with the world that might not have “solved” these crimes, but at least went some distance to contextualising them. Our Children, by contrast, tries to see sense in the senseless, and that way madness lies.

Like a parent poring over a child’s suicide, Our Children is helpless to do anything but look on with distress at the narrative events that befall its characters. It’s easy to understand the intentions of Lafosse and his co-writers in adopting this story, yet no matter the formal skill with which they tell it, its patent inability to ever tell us anything about this story leaves it maddeningly bereft of a point. The score exacerbates the emotions, the intimacy of the cinematography complements the enclosure, the breathtaking performance of Émilie Dequenne steers the gaze, but nothing can abate the frustration of a film that tries to explain the inexplicable.

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Ronan Doyle

Director of Movies On Demand & Sr. Staff Film Critic at Next Projection

Having spent the vast majority of my life sharing in the all too prevalent belief than cinema is merely dumbed-down weekend escapism for the masses, I was lucky enough to turn on a television at the exact right moment to have my perspectives on the medium completely transformed. Those first two and a half hours marked the beginning of a new life revolving around—maybe even depending upon—the screen and the depth of artistry, intellectual stimulation, and emotional exhilaration it can provide.

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