As film critics continue to pick over the spoils of Cannes 2010, for regular cinemagoers, it can take an awfully long time for the movies in question to trickle down to them.
Case in point: Mia Hansen-Løve’s remarkable sophomore feature “Father of My Children,” which impressed critics and won a special jury prize in the Un Certain Regard strand a year ago, but is only now wending its way to U.S. theaters. It opened last week in Los Angeles; tomorrow, New Yorkers get to lay eyes on it.
They’ll find it worth the wait. “Father of My Children,” which I reviewed out of the London Film Festival last October, is a marvelously mutable, personal study of family and film, beginning as a story about one thing and ending as quite another. Reviews and marketing materials may make it difficult to remain innocent of a key mid-film development — not a “twist” by any means, but a turn that entirely shifts and deepens the focus of the narrative — that floored me on my first encounter with the film. (I’ve done my best to keep it wrapped, but will insert a spoiler alert anyway.)
This much I can tell you: the film is inspired by, and ultimately something of a tribute to, the late Humbert Balsan, a prolific French film producer and renowned champion of the arthouse. Before his premature death in 2005, he shepherded works by the likes of Lars von Trier, Claire Denis, James Ivory and Béla Tarr, but also acted as mentor to rising talents — the young Hansen-Løve, then an aspiring filmmaker and sometime Cahiers du Cinéma critic, among them.