Reviewed: Our Children by Joachim Lafosse

Tears for fears.

Our Children (15)
Joachim Lafosse

There can be few larger gulfs between marketing and product than the one that exists in the case of the new film Our Children. UK cinemagoers contemplating the poster image of a young woman and her smiling husband laden with adorable moppets would be forgiven for expecting to have their faith in familial love renewed. But then infanticide is such a hard sell, don’t you find? The movie gets straight to the point. Its second image is a wide shot of the tarmac on an airport runway. Four tiny, white coffins are being fed along a conveyor belt into the hold of a plane. From this distance, they might be sugar lumps or baby teeth.

The director and co-writer, Joachim Lafosse, employs two recurring visual devices throughout the film, both gently disorienting. The first is a sudden cut from a wide shot to a close-up, or vice versa, as though reminding us to appreciate the bigger picture (or the smaller one). No sooner are our eyes lulled by the procession of those faroff caskets than Lafosse jumps to a tight close-up of Murielle (Émilie Dequenne) and Mounir (Tahar Rahim) in an intimate embrace several years earlier. They are fabulously in love and blissfully unaware that their happiness exists only in flashback.

Lafosse’s other favourite device is to observe his actors with a handheld camera positioned slightly off to one side. Nothing radical about that, except that he takes special care to include in these shots the blurred edge of a door frame or lamp post to suggest that the cinematographer is shooting surreptitiously like a paparazzo or peeping Tom. There’s a reason for this. As one of the great philosophers of our age once put it, there are three people in this marriage. When Murielle agrees to live with Mounir, she is moving in also with his adoptive father, André (Niels Arestrup), a GP who is always there when he’s needed – and also when he isn’t. He provides money with invisible strings attached. When he coughs up for the couple’s honeymoon, Mounir invites him along too. André placates their first baby when Murielle cannot. Soon she finds she cannot gain a toehold with her own offspring. Or, it transpires, with her husband.

It looks at first as though Mounir, who yearns sentimentally for the Moroccan village where his mother and brother still live, will be the subject of the picture. The camera can certainly be excused for doting on Rahim, who played the scrawny convict maturing into a crime boss in A Prophet. With his Valentino handsomeness, inky black locks and lupine grin, he is part-lout, partmatinee idol. How inspiring to pair him again with Arestrup, who bullied and mentored him in A Prophet and performs some of the same duties here. Arestrup has off-white hair like a department-store Santa; his grizzled face is rigid with resentment. We know from Murielle’s first meeting with André that this will be an unequal fight.

Eventually the young woman is squeezed out of marriage and motherhood. The movie shifts its focus toward Murielle, as if in sympathy, as Mounir’s interest in her starts to wane. Dequenne can be an implacable tough-nut, as she proved in her debut performance at the age of 18 in the Dardenne brothers’ 1999 film Rosetta. In Our Children, she’s more haunted than hunted. Her feline eyes glow in her blunt hexagonal face; if Rachel Weisz had endured a life of chimneysweeping and coal-mining rather than Bulgari and L’Oréal contracts, she might look something like this. Dequenne makes Murielle sorrowful without pleading for our pity; she is simply a bright woman outsmarted by callous men.

Before the film’s inevitably distressing conclusion, which is based on real events, Dequenne is given the colossal task of visualising the exact point of Murielle’s breakdown. In an unbroken, three-and-a-halfminute take, she sings along to the radio as she drives, her melodious voice gradually sabotaged by sobs. Those of us who are forever citing Nicole Kidman’s tear-stained close-up in Birth as the ultimate example of wordless acting will now have to update our reference points.