Le Garçu

Gérard dotes on Antoine, his four-year-old son, and gives nothing like the same care to his wife or his life. The film watches him move between women, lose his own father, and fail to learn how to be one. It is not interested in family drama. It is interested in the equality an immature man builds with his child: he does not talk down to the boy, he talks to him as a peer, and those scenes are the liveliest thing in the film. The form is Maurice Pialat's usual method: scenes begin in the middle, arguments are cut before they resolve, and the acting is left to improvisation. The detail at its core is private. The boy on screen is Pialat's own son Antoine; the director became a father in his sixties, and the film works through both his father's death and his own fatherhood in fictional form. This was Pialat's last film. He was not satisfied with it and planned to recut it, and his health did not allow it. Gérard Depardieu leads, with Géraldine Pailhas and Dominique Rocheteau in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who love Pialat's cinema and raw domestic scenes. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a story. The film is deliberately loose, the links between scenes are weak, and nobody arrives anywhere.