One solution may lie with her casting, which favors a forthright briskness over the cute. How Mia Hansen-Love, who wrote and directed “The Father of My Children,” manages to render this certainty of the heart without slumping into the sentimental is something of a puzzle. This hardly suggests a man in dire straits, yet we never begrudge him such luxury, perhaps because we gather at once that love, especially the love of family, strikes him as non-negotiable. In fact, Grégoire has two homes, one in Paris, and one in the country, near a river. Grégoire’s juggling of these different projects, which could have left “The Father of My Children” looking fussy or overburdened, is reflected instead by a mercurial switch in tones, with the dialogue-and the camera’s focus of attention-alighting with ease on both the throwaway and the grave.
On the other hand, a shoot in Sweden is going ahead, despite the fierce whims of the director and the suicide of one of his underlings. True, the laboratory that processes his movies is waiting for the million euros that he owes, and the Korean film crew that just flew into town numbers eighteen rather than eight, including a baby. Grégoire runs a small production company in Paris, and the street-level shots of the city during the opening credits, with a zestful tune on the soundtrack, imply that life is leading him a merry dance, but nothing worse. At the start, everything looks fine-frazzled, for sure, but not beyond salvage or soothing. His first words are C’est moi, and what follows is the dissolution of the moi.
The hero in question is Grégoire Canvel, a movie producer, played by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing as an entirely credible blend of the dedicated and the feckless. “I wish you’d seen how charming I was,” he says. After the cops pull him over for speeding, at night, and arrest him, he seems not just unsurprised but undismayed, proudly making light of the situation when his wife-also in a perfectly good mood-comes to fetch him from the police station. At one superb moment, he even has two phones on the go, in order to check a text while he talks. From the fact that the hero drives a car with a cell phone in one hand, a cigarette in the other, no hands on the wheel, and no seat belt, it can swiftly be deduced that “The Father of My Children” is a French film.
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