A perdre la raison (Our children)( 誰知亞媽心)

My next two films at the HKIFF are both concerned with that most universal social form of human organization known as the family. The first is a joint production of Belgium, Luxembourg and France called in French "A Perdre la raison" (To lose reason/the mind ) and in English entitled Our Children (originally entitled "Loving without Reason")  and in Chinese「 誰知亞媽心」by Belgian writer-driector Joachaim Lafosse.

As the film opens we see a thirty-ish woman in a hospital, Murielle (Émilie Dequenne) giving directions as to how 4 children's caskets are to be flown back to Morocco and buried with their ancestors. Then we see two men hug each other in the hospital corridor. They are Dr. André Pinget (Niels Arestrup) and Mounir (Tahar Rahim), the latter being the adopted son of the former. Then the film flashes back to how it all happened: to the time before Mounir's marriage to Murielle. In fact, the story is based on a real life quadruple infanticide by their Belgian mother.

We are shown step by step how Mournir could not be separated from Murielle, a primary school teacher, how he graduated from college, hoping to enrol in the faculty of medicine, failed and how his adopted father suggested that if he like, he could work for him at his busy clinic, how he offered to pay for all the expenses of the newly weds' honeymoon in Morocco, how Mounir would not accept unless he were to accompany them, how if Mounir did not mind, he could continue to live in his adoptive father's house, how Mounir's first baby arrived, then the second, then the third, how the house became too cramped, how Dr. Pinget got a bigger flat and how he finally got a son after three daughters, how Dr. Pinget would patiently play and coach the children and how the children prefer him to their mother, how the mother felt the domestic work of teaching during the day and taking care of the house and preparing food for two men and four children  gradually took its toll and made her feel inadequate, how she suggested to Mournir that they should live in Morocco away from Dr. Pinget and how when Mournir mentioned that to him, Dr. Pinget wanted to sever all further relations with him, how Dr. Pinget suggested that she got a little psychological help from one of his friends and how she let slip the fact that the doctor who recommended her to the psychiatrist was in fact her father in law, something Dr. Pinget asked her never to disclose upon learning of the same her shrink said that she could no longer continue to do her therapy with Dr. Pinget as part of her team because it was against professional rules and how for that reason, how she lied to Dr. Pinget that she would stop therapy because she was sufficiently cured when in fact it might be that if she told him the true reason, Dr. Pinget would probably give her one of his quiet and perfectly controlled icy looks of displeasure and how she ceased to take the sedative pills and how after she did so, she stole a knife at the supermarket and called her children then playing together at the sitting room to go up to her bedroom one by one into her room and then when they were all there, she killed them off and then stabbed herself and then called her shrink to tell her what she had done.

It's a story of how how a manipulative and skilful father in law can create so much pressure which when added to the normal pressure of having to look after 4 demanding young children without any support from one's own husband and how the little things and unhappiness of everyday life can build up so much stress upon a psyche subject to depression that it could be released ultimately through a burst of mindless violence of four of one's own children. Lafosse told the story really well: without exaggeration, without overdramatization, without comment,  instead of through the subjective point of view of Murielle, obviously the focus of the film. His job was rendered much easier because of the excellent performance by all three of the protagonist, Arestrrup, Rahim and  Dequenne. I also like the insistent theme of the baroque music of Alessandro Scarlatti that underline every new important episode adding to the emotional strain on Murielle, as if it were a devil hovering over the horizon waiting to overwhelm her and also the final episode when Murielle was driving and listening to the song Julien Clerc "Femmes je
vous aime" in her car when she broke down sobbing.

It was a powerful film because everything seem to happen so "naturally" and we are shown all the details of what led Murielle to the final explosion almost clinically. Yet when the final tragic climax came, I'm so glad that I was spared the gory details: Lafosse shot the scene of the house nice, spik and span, orderly from a distance and just the sound of 4 objects falling, one after another and then the agitated voice of Murielle speaking on the telephone to her shrink, informing her what she had done, as if a theorem had been proven in mathematics as domestic bliss slowly and methodically drove Murielle over the edge, spiraling from initial inconvenience, into oppressive discomfort, then into depression and finally into despairing desperation. We can almost viscerally feel the suffocating force of Dr. Pinget's calm, polite, considerate and ostensibly completely rationally justified intervention and intrusion into the lives of Mounir and Murielle and their children. What is most shocking is that we can't find any fault with Dr. Pinget's approach. He did it out of excess of "love" for his adopted son and his family! He paid for everything and provided for every one of their material needs. He even helped Mounir's brother in Morroco to enter into a false marriage with  Murielle's sister ! But did he do it only of disinterested love for Mounir and Murielle. Through the film, we never see him hang out with any friends or women. Appearances notwithstanding, could he have been an emotional parasite, sucking the life out of emotional bond between Mounir and Murielle and their children until his smothering "affection" and "care" and "concern" become unbearable and yet leaving behind absolutely no room for any "rejection" of his apparently "selfless" offer of fatherly love ? His beautiful house had been turned into an emotional inferno and what appeared to be a guardian angel had become a prison warder!

The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, where Émilie Dequenne won the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Actress and Lafosse won the award as best film at the Sao Paulo Film Festival.