A Bad Son

Claude Sautet's film follows Bruno, who returns to France after five years in an American prison on drugs charges. Patrick Dewaere plays him and Yves Robert his father. The father does not forgive him, believing the news of the sentence caused his mother's death, and he says so. What Sautet does is refuse to turn the relationship into a reconciliation. Bruno looks for work, takes a job in a bookshop, starts something with a woman played by Brigitte Fossey who is a former addict, and the distance between him and his father never really closes. The film only asks whether the two men can learn to stand in the same room. Behind all this are the questions that would grow in France over the following years: unemployment, informal work, the position of immigrants, and the difficulty of being homosexual. Sautet does not turn any of them into a thesis; he leaves them inside the scenes. It opened on 15 October 1980, and Dewaere's work in it is considered among his finest. Who it is for: viewers who love French realism of the seventies and eighties, Sautet, and Dewaere. Who it is not for: anyone wanting plot or an emotional resolution.