‘The Quiet Son’: Venice Review

Dirs/scr: Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin. France. 2024. 110mins

A French father is confronted with the limits of his love and sense of responsibility in The Quiet Son, a drama that examines what happens to a family when the eldest child starts hanging out with violent far-right groups. Directed by sisters Muriel and Delphine Coulin (17 Girls, The Stopover), what’s surprising is the extent to which the film focuses on family dynamics to the exclusion of any kind of political commentary – the wrong crowd the son falls in with are deeply connected to simmering, socio-political discontents that are not addressed at all. This Venice Competition title might attract awards attention in France for its performances, particularly Vincent Lindon who won Best Actor at Venice, it is otherwise an utterly conventional domestic drama whose focus feels too narrow to be saying much about the country today. 

This narrowness of scope throws Lindon’s performance into high relief

In the tiny village of Villerupt, in the country’s northeastern corner near the Luxembourg border, railway worker Pierre (Lindon) lives with his two sons, 22-year-old Felix, nicknamed Fus, (Benjamin Voisin, from François Ozon’s Summer Of 85), an unemployed metalworker, and younger student Louis (Stefan Crepon, from Ozon’s Peter Von Kant), who is about to move to Paris to go university at the Sorbonne. Pierre is trying to do his best with his children after the death of their mother, and the brothers care about each other but couldn’t be more different. Indeed, the screenplay, based on Laurent Petitmangin’s 2020 novel ’What You Need From The Night’, feels at times a little too conveniently schematic in terms of its contrasts and oppositions – Fus conveniently scoffs at Louis’ upcoming education amongst the Parisian elites, reminding us of the fact that he is increasingly attracted to far-right ideas. 

But the heart of The Quiet Son is not the relationship between the siblings, which always remains something of a neatly drawn Venn diagram rather more than a more complex, living-and-breathing thing whose contours might change from day to day. Instead, the Coulin sisters focus more on Pierre, the father who thinks that working hard and treating his sons with kindness will somehow make their little family unit immune from outside pressure or potential tragedy. Because the character is played by the imposing Lindon, this side of the story feels well-rounded. But, upon closer inspection, it becomes obvious that a lot of that is down to the charismatic performance rather than what the story is actually telling us.

The Quiet Son — an odd title for a film about a young man who comes home increasingly bloody and beaten up every time he hangs out with his far-right friends — is shot in slick chiaroscuro widescreen by Belgian cinematographer Frédéric Noirhomme. Here, too, there is a sense that the glossy package is meant to paper over a harsher, more complicated reality. 

Most baffling is that there is zero sense that the far right in France is something that exists beyond the village of Villerupt, let alone that it is a massive political movement that has been allowed to grow because certain realities are being ignored by the established political class. We never even see how Fus was indoctrinated, who his far-right buddies really are or why they behave as they do – key information that all transpires off-screen. Instead, the Coulins foreground Pierre’s emotional journey, rather than exploring why his son has been led astray or digging into the reality that similar stories are happening all over France.

This narrowness of scope throws Lindon’s performance into high relief and, when he gives a corker of a third-act speech, you cannot but be impressed. But there’s a nagging sense that it reduces the reality of the far right to an otherwise nondescript obstacle that Pierre needs to overcome, instead of a severe political division that’s eating away at a lot of already very fragile families in France – and, in its various permutations, elsewhere in the world. This imbalance makes Pierre’s painful journey far less resonant and universal than it could have been.