Tu seras mon fils

Gilles Legrand delivers with Tu Seras Mon Fils a poignant drama carried an excellent duo of actors whose performances are oozing accuracy, the always masterful Niels Arestrup, frightening as an authoritarian and despising patriarch, and Lorànt Deutsch, touching as a constantly demeaned son.

The viewer ends up completely carried away by this polished familial tragedy where the implacable unfolding of the plot and the striking dialogues totally captivate from end to end. However, certain motivations are a bit hard to assimilate and the purpose of the opening scene is questionable because it incomprehensibly reveals the twist of the movie, which by the way could be regarded as a bit sloppy.

All in all, Tu Seras Mon Fils overall is solid and deserves more consideration than the press critics tried to convince us.

The film is a well-crafted study of two fathers and two sons. One father owns a prestigious French vineyard but cannot accept or encourage his own son, whom he actually despises, despite the young man's constant attempts to please his father. The other father, terminally ill with cancer, had been estate manager of the vineyard. When his son, who had emigrated and worked for a California winery, returns to visit his dying father, the vineyard owner is so impressed that he attempts to lure the visitor back to France with an impressive job package... including an offer to legally adopt him so that he would share in the inheritance of the vineyard. So now the lines of conflict are neatly in place. One son versus the other. The dying father versus the vineyard owner whom he believes is trying to "steal" away his son... added to the basic conflict between a demanding father and his thankless son. The characters are skillfully drawn and flawlessly acted by a marvelous cast of French players. I thought the direction and photography were superb; you will also learn a lot about the art of growing grapes and producing fine French wines.

This movie is inept, not because of its acting, which is not top notch but because of the script: characters are unidimensional and we never know whose story it is.... The women characters, though hardly visible, at least have a like ability that the men characters lack Besides the lack of interesting characters, the story isn't interesting. It is highly predictable (no, I'm not going to tell you how it ends, but you can figure it in the first ten minutes of the film, if you are not yet discouraged. The only redeeming scenes (and probably those who explains the high grades given by reviewers and more sadly by the metascore critics) are those showing the fabrication of wine. Probably those who enjoyed the movie enjoyed wine, and that is a good excuse. To summarize, there are many better ways of spending 90 minutes of your time, one of which is to open a bottle of wine.

There's a grim tale well-told in 'You Will be My Son': that of an egotistical wine-maker whose love of his craft exceeds that for his son, and to such an extent that he feels under no obligation to hide it. The film pivots around these two points, indulging a sense of love for the craft of traditional wine-making, but portraying the father's behaviour in an utterly unsympathetic light. But the son is a bit too craven to be interesting: he has a mysteriously beautiful wife, and his refusal to leave, and preference to stay around and be bullied instead, is a bit mystifying; ultimately the film perhaps shares with its characters a sense that patrimony is at heart the proper way of the world. The ambiguous ending, however, is well-judged.

The lead is a distinctive actor with all the subtlety of the script in this role. The poor beleaguered son is so unsure of his place in the world that his masochism in remaining in his father's universe is barely believable...though his behavior begs for more beatings of a psychological kind. The loyal wife of the junior loves him for reasons unknown to the viewer; under the sheets, perhaps? The once (1960-70) disco scene is resurrected here to hardly any purpose. The manager of the vineyard, dying of cancer, gets the best draw of script which he fulfills with professionalism and dignity, and his practical and loyal wife plays her role beautifully. As to the prodigal would be son, an insensitive cad and gainer well played here. The logic of the script is minimal and the resolution more abrupt and fevered than what precedes it logically allows. Beautiful shots of the vineyard. All in all, this vintage is pas mal but no chapeau.