18/05/2007

French director David Oelhoffen has made a successful debut in the world of feature film today with the competition screening in International Critics’ Week of In Your Wake [+see also:
trailer
film profile], an edgy and austere thriller-family drama.

With masterful performances from new talent Nicolas Giraud and more experienced actor Jacques Gamblin, a son and a father get to know and love one another in a sharp story (scripted by the director) in which masks are removed to reveal lives of solitude, desperate ambition and scathing disillusion.

"We’re not going to lie to each other, I know that you hate me". When Gabriel turns up once again in the drab life of his 20 year-old son, Marco, a dishwasher in Paris, it is an enigmatic character that makes an appearance. A night owl, fond of alcohol with a childlike enthusiasm and a cannibalistic smile, the father and his projects (buying a bar) gradually invade the uneventful life of the shy and retiring Marco, a boxer in his spare time.

But this nocturnal "friendship" very quickly slides towards shady affairs ("It would do you good to lie from time to time") and the son accepts organising a warehouse break-in out of sympathy for his father, who is in financial difficulty.

By stalking a night watchman, meeting with a third thief (the excellent and disturbing Gérard Laroche) and being confronted with violence Marco sees his father in a different light: a weak, depressive man, a manipulator of and manipulated by a seedy underworld. Everything is set up for an Oedipal story, as Marco has to disentangle confused feelings that Oelhoffen skilfully depicts matter-of-factly.

Through the use of rapid close-ups, these very physical masculine emotions are successively retained and then brutally liberated, enabling the director to keep a balance with the intrigue of a genre film, its codes and its territories (warehouses, night bars, very Melvillian footbridges), complemented by the cinematography by Lubomir Bakchev. The end product is a highly promising film of action and reflection, just like the "strong and weak" alcohol drunk by the two protagonists.

Produced by Olivier Charvet for the young outfit Kaléo Films, the €1.67m in Your Wake was co-produced by Rhône-Alpes Cinéma and received pre-sales from Canal+ and Ciné Cinéma.

International sales are being handled by Pyramide, who will also handle the film’s French release next autumn.

(Translated from French)