Presented at the end of Critics’ Week, Erwan Le Duc’s second feature film offers a vision full of accuracy and fantasy of fatherhood, led by two talents of French cinema. It’s original, funny, it’s not to be missed!
At the end of Critics’ Week, we discovered a nugget. Second feature film by Erwan Le Duc (after Perdrix which had nicely unseated the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, today Quinzaine des Cinéastes), Her Father’s Daughter depicts a paternal and filial relationship full of poetry and freedom.
The story of Etienne who was barely twenty years old when he fell in love with Valérie, and hardly more when their daughter Rosa was born. The day Valérie abandons them, he chooses not to make a drama out of it. Etienne and Rosa are building a happy life. Sixteen years later, when the young girl has to leave to study and it is necessary to separate for everyone to live their life, the past resurfaces.
In the shoes of the resilient but still damaged father, Nahuel Perez Biscayart (the revelation of 120 Beats per Minute and Goodbye up there) is magical, like a frail, burlesque, quirky Buster Keaton, listening to the wide-eyed those around him try to define what he feels or should feel.
At his side, still as endearing, Céleste Brunnquell (revealed in Les Dazzled and better known for In Therapy) is more composed but just as funny and above all luminous, as a young girl attached to her father and to their singular relationship of equality. Because they grew up together by detaching themselves from the lack and need of others, these two are close.
A nice flashback game makes us relive with delicacy the birth of this unconditional relationship, full of tenderness. When the child has to leave the nest, the question of emancipation seen as necessary revives the painful original separation undergone. And the torments that go with it.
“This relationship of total trust moved me a lot, this work of transmission from this father to his daughter. It’s a love story that I find magnificent with a real relationship of equality and this physical resemblance where both are juveniles. We don’t really know where they are in their parenthood and how they are both building their lives from their relationship”, analyzes Céleste Brunnquell during our meeting on the Croisette. Touched by this story “very intimate places”the young actress confides to us that she was completely attracted by the style of her director, her original universe and her sensitive proposition.
Sensitive and nuanced. Because even if the backdrop of his film has to do with the loss of a love and a mother, Erwan Le Duc remains on the same wavelength as his hero: he does not want to give too much space to the drama within its subject matter which it treats with seriousness but balances with a plethora of beautifully comedic scenes, fed with hilarious and brilliant lines that revisit sex, love and death.
Special mentions to the priceless supporting roles, from the epic poet boyfriend (Mohammed Louridi), to the disillusioned real estate agent friend, to the mayor of the city in crisis (genial Noémie Lvovsky) and the healthy and serene lover (moving Maud Wyle).
On this point, “there is no love lost” we end up understanding in this charming opus not devoid of hope and which, in terms of aroused emotions, dares to the opposite end at the same time as the skilful mixture of offbeat romanticism, realistic poetry and funny drama. As desired.
Discover Erwan Le Duc’s first feature film: