05/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: The French filmmakers explain their new film, a family- and politics-focused drama about paternal and fraternal love, betrayal, and the question of forgiveness

(© Fabrizio de Gennaro/Cineuropa)

Unveiled in competition within the 81st Venice Film Festival, The Quiet Son [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Delphine and Muriel Coulin
film profile] is the 3rd feature film by French directors Delphine and Muriel Coulin.

Cineuropa: What made you want to adapt Laurent Petitmangin’s novel What You Need From the Night?
Delphine Coulin: One day, I said to my sister: "if you messed up, I’d forgive you; no matter what you’d done, you’d still be my sister". But for Muriel, it would have depended on what I’d done, so it wasn’t unconditional love. It was a recurring discussion for us and when we came across the book, we realised it explored this very question: a father finds himself faced with what he considers to be a betrayal by the son and wonders if he’ll ever be able to forgive him.

Muriel Coulin: It was also about continuing to love someone. How can you accept someone, carry on seeing them, etc., when you’re not at all on board with what they think and do?

DC: There’s an additional layer to it too, given that there’s a father involved. It’s a political dispute and the father wonders where he went wrong in his son’s education. He doesn’t have any of the same values as this son who now claims to belong to the far-right. A what point did he fail to pass on the values he believes in so much? How far is a father responsible for his son’s opinions and actions? We thought is was interesting, because anyone who has children and anyone who has parents (i.e. everyone) can ask themselves this same question. And it’s also about France, which elected a left-wing president 12 years ago but which mostly voted for the far-right in the most recent European elections. At what point did those values totally change and are we responsible for the opinions of those around us?

The film revolves around paternal love, but it’s also about the complexities of fraternal love.
MC: It’s like a vortex; the film advances like a spiral. It’s a continual game of three-cushion billiards between love and hate: the three characters love each other, then they hate one another, then they’re jealous of one another and then the climate changes once again. It’s just like in any other family: there are times when you don’t necessarily agree, but there’s common ground between you, a shared past, strong ties. What happens when there’s a huge disagreement? What kind of forces come into play? We wanted to study all that in depth, and we had three extraordinary actors.

DC: We also wanted to explore the theme of similarity and dissimilarity, because there’s always a bit of that in a family. We notably played on pairings: at times, the eldest son and the father are similar, at others it’s the two brothers, sometimes they’re dissimilar, etc. There’s also the question of why we refuse dissimilarities in families.

A lot of crucial events take place off-camera.
DC: We see things from the father’s viewpoint, and he doesn’t see everything. Playing with events off-camera is a way of asking: what would I have done in his place? What can we do to change the people around us? Is it even possible?

MC: The father doesn’t see it coming, his son slowly going off the rails, he only sees the outward signs. Obviously, the son has some strange friends, but you can’t control everything about your child’s life. So the father finds out about it over time, and the shock he feels progresses in line with the viewer’s. We’ve seen a few caricatural films where we can single out a specific reason for a particular outcome, but in reality, it’s a combination of things that raise our suspicions in this movie, and then we find out the truth. It was this journey that was interesting to us. And we don’t think there’s just one cause, one reason for someone to drift towards extremism; it’s a combination of psychological factors, encounters, humiliations, a slightly toxic context, etc.

(Translated from French)