11/06/2024 - Jean-François Laguionie crafts a delicate and beautiful opus about the metaphorical journey of a family trio building a boat in their garden in the post-war period

"I had the entire universe around me, which I now considered to be a genuine friend". It’s an internal navigation guide, a birth chart tracing the ways in which everyday life can be transformed through the power of imagination, but also an affectionate exploration of things left unsaid in family relationships and of (non-nostalgic) memories of shared moments, at the intersection of individual trajectories, that French director Jean-François Laguionie (particularly well-known for A Monkey’s Tale, Black Mor’s Island, Le Tableau [+see also:
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"I’m going to try to sketch out my father’s journey for you. I was ten years old when he embarked upon this adventure". Standing in front of his easel at ENSAD, teenage François delves back into 1949 when ration cards were still in operation, in a small town on the edges of Marne, not far from the Noisiel chocolate shop, when Paris’s outer suburbs still flirted with the countryside. In a quiet street, three kilometres from the river, the family home is about to bear witness to a revolution in the garden and François’ life will open itself up to new horizons. For not only does he discover that he’s not the biological son of his father Pierre, a taciturn sales rep and a casual handyman, he also learns that the latter has a secret passion revolving around the book Sailing Alone Around the World by American writer Joshua Slocum, who was the first person to sail solo around the world aboard the Spray - a 37-foot-long wooden sloop - over the course of three years, two months and two days, between April 1895 and June 1898.

And now François’ father has decided to embark upon the construction of an almost exact replica of the boat (though slightly smaller owing to the size of the garden; in other words 11.2 metres long and 4.32m wide). It’s an extraordinary home-based ship-making project which goes on until 1955 and in which he involves his wife Geneviève and their son, because in addition to being a manual undertaking, it’s also a labour of love…

Replete with good humour, imagination, poetry, bikes, open-air cafes and gypsy jazz, an island on the Marne harbouring first loves, BHV and the Maritime Museum in Paris, and cinema with Gary Cooper in Cecil B. DeMille’s Unconquered, an entire era is gently brought to the surface in A Boat in the Garden. But the film gracefully sidesteps any melancholy attachment to the past by anchoring itself in the universal, namely a young boy’s sense of observation and ability to listen, a boy who wants to love and be loved by his father, but who’s also growing up himself. And by inserting ocean-based escapades in the company of the real Joshua Slocum into this family tale, the brilliant screenplay (penned by the filmmaker with his usual accomplice Annick Le Ray) provides us with a journey which is kindly and enchanting on three levels (the awakening of François, his father’s dream, and the round-the-world trip from the Magellan Strait to the trade winds), in the form of a sensitive animation playing with light and shadows and the subtle art of charcoal, and set to Pascal Le Pennec’s beautiful music. At 84 years of age, Jean-François Laguionie is a veritable master whose apparent modesty does nothing to hide his immense talent, as if "the wall closing in around the boat had simply given it more freedom".

A Boat in the Garden is produced by Luxembourg firm Mélusine Productions and French outfit JPL Films, with international sales steered by Urban Sales.

(Translated from French)