Daddy Nostalgie

After extensive heart surgery, a retired businessman living in the south of France returns home to convalesce. There he is visited by his daughter Caroline. As his health declines, Caroline is confronted by all the familiar behaviour patterns of her relationship with her mother and father.

This is an exquisite example of cinematic subtlety and understatement from Tavernier, Bogarde and Birkin. Tavernier enables his actors to create an intensely realistic 'family' - proud father, long-suffering mother, loving yet insecure daughter - all struggling to come to terms with the fragility of life. Bogarde and Birkin are deeply moving as father and daughter, clumsily struggling to communicate as adults after a lifetime of parent and child, and Laure provides selfless support, raging silently against the inevitable.

As a study of life's finite nature, this is faultless. As a final outing for Bogarde, it is a fitting and extraordinary tribute to a master-craftsman of the cinema.

Lovely swansong of actor Dirk Bogarde, playing an English businessman who is dying after a heart operation which only served to postpone the inevitable. The film is an unforgettable final weeks of close interaction between father and daughter (Jane Birkin) which never happened earlier in their life. The mother, a devout Catholic and a bridge addict and once beautiful, is not a person of high intellectual capacity. Bogarde and the charming Jane Birkin are used by Tavernier to put together a family film that could have been a Michael Powell (of Powell and Pressburger fame) product and by a coincidence Powell died the year this Tavernier film was released. Tavernier dedicated the film to Powell, whose works must have made an impact on Tavernier. Bogarde died 9 years after this film. The film belongs to a mature, beautiful and middle-aged toothy Birkin; Bogarde; and Tavernier. The original story was written by Colo Tavernier, who was Bertrand Tavernier's former wife (they divorced in 1981) but the film was co-scripted by both Bertrand and Colo. I wonder if Tavernier was influenced by another Bogarde film, "The Night Porter," in crafting the considerably different-end sequence in his film, with the rainy weather and the camera following the character(s) along the sidewalks.

Daddy Nostalgie centers its attention on Jane Birkin's character, Caroline, who is a successful screenwriter based in Paris. As the story opens, she receives a call from her mother explaining that her father is in the hospital recovering from heart surgery. Tony Russell, her father, played by Dirk Bogarde in his final role, was a successful international salesman who had to spend much of his career traveling abroad. Caroline, ever the dutiful daughter, then travels to the Cote d'Azur to be by her parents' side during this family crisis. During this time, Caroline finally has a chance to get to know her father for what might be the first time.

While most films tend to gloss over the more complex and lasting aspects of familial relationships, this film focuses on them. In life, every action is steeped in history, and every action carries with it consequences for good and/or for ill. This film is true to that reality. Daddy Nostalgie examines how people live with the consequences of their actions, how those consequences often echo through the generations, and how we can both love and hate someone at the same time.

What makes this film superior is how the director is able to show the emotional complexity of the characters. They are forced to confront many opposites, such as love and hate, life and death, marriage and divorce. While struggling to remain calm on the surface, each character must try to suppress the emotions being churned up within. Tavernier is able to show how everyone is successful, but only to a point, of maintaining such a false front. All are trying to hide their feelings from the others, but also from themselves. And it is why and how they maintain these facades that make this film both interesting and bittersweet.

Daddy Nostalgie looked promising right from the outset. A film by Bertrand Tavernier (director of the gentle, beautiful 'Sunday in the Country') starring Jane Birkin (so superb in La Belle Noiseuse) and Dirk Bogarde (who stole the show from Gielgud and Burstyn in Providence... no mean feat at all) - it was hard to imagine this being anything other than a quality film.

And yet, even I was surprised by how good it was. So few films allow you to truly empathise with the characters, but this movie is an exception. You really feel for Birkin's character, as you see the hurt she still feels from being ignored as a child. The best scenes are those between her and her father - he, trying to make the most of his last days, and she, trying to make the most of her last days with him. Even the crabby mother is given a degree of character development as the film moves on, but in the end she takes a back seat to the performance of the two superb lead actors.

A sensitive, mature film with truly beautiful cinematography, this is one that will surely be appreciated by anyone who has had to deal with family relationships at any stage in their life.

I second Victoria's comments. A profoundly moving film.

Caroline loves her father and craves his attention, but he has lived a self-indulgent life and never gave her the time and affection she needed. Now, as time is running out, they both strive to heal their relationship.

A superbly successful investigation of the relationship between a woman and her father, that both analyzes their feelings and narrates their efforts to reach each other, and which ends in a timeless, transcendental moment capturing the bittersweet and ephemeral nature of life.

For me,as a man, the film gave insight into the father/daughter relationship; I notice that young women gave this film a higher rating than other groups.

Also, one of the few English language films of Jane Birkin widely available in the USA, along with Dust and Kung Fu Master. A uniquely sensitive actress with a large body of work in French cinema.