Les invités de mon père

An interesting glossy French bourgeois comedy that has serious overtones. This is a study of the blindness of do-gooding, the selfishness of an old man, seeking to rediscover his youth, the limits of charity. A wealthy man, a retired doctor, takes in an eastern European woman and her young daughter and marries her so she can work in France and eventually have secure status. Little by little he falls in love with her and they become sexually involved despite the great gap between their ages. From the beginning the man's daughter and son find the woman offensive, crude, annoying. Only later they realize that she is threatening to destroy their sense of family and cut them off from their father and their patrimony. Fabrice Lucchini has never been better than he is here as the worldly-wise lawyer son Arnaud Paumelle, who at first grants the father the right to do what he wants, but then reaches the point where he must put his foot down. Karin Viard is excellent as Arnaud's doctor sister, whose confusion at the family disruption is expressed by an affair with her young male associate. Michel Aumont is solid as the retired doctor father Lucien, who marries at the age of eighty. The issues are handled with subtlety, despite the overall comic tone. (Allociné 2.6/63 shows solid approval.) This is an example of French film comedy at its most intelligent.

The more I see of Fabrice Luchini, the more he impresses me. I don't think I have ever encountered a comic actor with a better sense of timing and pathos. Chaplin was legendary for playing human tragedy absolutely straight, and making us laugh despite ourselves, no matter how much we might really want to cry. Luchini has the same incredible skill. A twist of the mouth, an arch of the eyebrow, a lowering of the gaze, and disaster is transformed into hilarity.

In his period pieces like Molière or Beaumarchais he was superb, but you have to know your French classics to really appreciate his achievement. In this contemporary gem we see him at his very best. The would be PC tolerant son of an aging radical, he has to balance his political correctness against his bourgeois ideas of family and social order, all the while dealing with his rôle as a husband, a father and a successful lawyer.

The dialogue is understated - there are no belly laughs in this comedy, but as the plot unrolls, we get a real feel of the tensions inherent in present day urban living - family demands, career demands, social requirements, socio-political issues, you name it. A sense of humour is given us to cope with the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." Fabrice Luchini handles it all with impeccable restraint.

Restraint goes out the window, though, for Karin Viard in the rôle of his sister. Her over-the-top reaction to the family situation results in a torrid relationship with her partner in her medical practice that provides the near slapstick relief that the plot demands.

Supporting cameos by a couple of up and coming young child actors - Max Renaudin and Emma Siniavski serve to provide the gilding of the lily.

Watch it and rejoice.

spoil alerts: I guess i must be the only one who saw this movie beyond the immigrate and social class issues that the film talks about. I am talking about the many psychological points that i thought the director covered here.

It felt to me that the director's intent was to to show how the children have tried to impress their dad all their lives so much that they are unable to know who they are and when a stranger comes to take that love from their dad, they feel cheated. It is very cleverly explaining that one must never try to be someone else for the sake of someone else's love. Or you will lose your own self.

As for the dad, he is perceived as someone selfless. Because he has been an activist all his life. But he has been a selfish parent all his life. And the director here i think wants to question the notion of selfishness and selflessness.

In psychology, we now start to realize that people who have been social activists for example but have often left their children on their own, were not really aware that they were subconsciously not willing to commit to a family of their own ( often due to their own unresolved childhood issues) and they tried to escape it by throwing themselves in their careers.

Finally i think it questioned the motive of the dad that throws himself in a relation with a person that has 3 times his age. A man who has it all intellectually but seemingly feels very poor in terms of love. The love that his children has for him, does not seem to be of value to him.

He only cares for this young person's love. And it asks the question has this man loved with his heart and flesh at all? or was it enough? The fact that he can't stop himself from throwing all he has for this young woman shows how desperate he is to be loved for being just a simple man with manhood needs.

It also explores the sexual needs of a man at a certain age and how it is viewed by his own children. I thought it has an excellent movie that had many depths and is extremely well thought out and put together, touching many sensitive subjects without judging them.

I think you have to go pretty far back in time to get Hollywood versions of this type of comedy, like the banter in Girl Friday. This comedy in the French style revolves around class issues, albeit subtle ones in this case. Here, an old battle-scared socialist doctor marries, unbeknown to his own bourgeoisified children, a beautiful but blowsy Moldovan refugee to help her get her papers. He becomes besotted, and she exploits him just a bit too much for his children's taste and settled values. Everything revolves around the tension this creates in the children's lives, but through the tension and even vicious infighting, there are a lot of great lines and insightful psychology. Tatiana's déclassé manners and image at first even loosens up the uptight children, but when daddy disinherits them to provide for his spring bride's future, things fall apart. The ending (which I won't reveal) is a bit weak, but the rest, especially the dialogue and the sparkling acting by everyone involved are just wonderful. Of course, French films and their humour often revolve around this style of acting, where the actor embodies a Commedia dell'arte-style stereotype, except here it's a class and not a gender or sexual identity (this is France, not Italy). That's the hard part to translate to American audiences, first, literally in the subtitles and also in the larger sense, when Americans try to remake these French classics. How can one bring class tensions into the picture and make them meaningful to American audiences without falling into the parody of Trading Places (remember, Dan Ackroyd is a Yalie because he has a "posh" accent, and Eddie Murphy is street because, well, because he's Eddie Murphy) ? That's the part that often takes these movies beyond the comedic and into bittersweet truths. This is a great movie and definitely worth finding it, though I can't vouch for how it's subtitled (saw it in French).