NIELS ARESTRUP AND LORÀNT DEUTSCH IN YOU WILL BE MY SON

Predictable outcomes

Gilles Legrand constructs a family tragedy in the world of top-grade French winemaking in You Will Be My Son, the study of an aging father who doesn't love his energetic but somewhat wimpy son or trust him to take over the business, particularly not the "aesthetic" part, the shaping of superb vintages. Paul de Marseul (Niels Arestrup) is the egocentric father who loves his two-thousant-euro shoes more than his son. When his general manager François Amelot (Patrick Chenais) is clearly dying of pancreatic cancer, Paul invites his son Philippe (Nicolas Bridet) to come over from California, where he's been working for Francis Copola's expensive vanity wine project, and woos him to take on his father's key role, bypassing his own son, who has worked at the winery all his life. Everything is neatly laid out here, and none of it works, because it's all too obvious. This movie will do if you want to pass 102 minutes listening to French and looking at a luxurious winery and a fancy hotel in Paris in nice weather, but the predictability is absolutely stultifying. Everything here is strictly by the numbers.

Niels Arestrup is a fine actor, noted for his depictions of complicated mentors in Audiard's Beat My Heart Skipped and A Prophet (both of which got him Césars) -- very different and distinctive roles. It's funny how generic he somehow seems here. Good as he is, Arestrup can't salvage a conventional, unimaginative film, and he's given lines that say, in every scene, I don't like my son, I belittle my son, I discount my son. There is not an ounce of complexity. As the two alternative sons, Deutsch and Bridet are remarkably similar looking: Bridet is just a tad sexier and has better hair, with more of a swirl to it. Women are stereotyped. François' wife Madelaine (Valérie Mairesse) is a nag, one of the many urging us not to like Paul, as if we needed prompting. Martin's wife Alice (Anne Marivin) makes it even easier: she can't stand Paul even before Paul begins maneuvering to displace her husband with Philippe. Every scene tells us to hate this son-of-a-bitch. There is something ill-judged in the way the film through Paul turns good living into crassness, access to the best wines into conspicuous consumption and self-indulgence, and has Martin's nerves and anger as he's humiliated and pushed away lead him to develop an alcohol problem (all this is worthy of Dickens at his most unsubtle) -- hardly advantageous ways of making us value the world of wine where France has always been supreme.

The movie sells glossiness and exclusivity, the best wines, the best winemaking and bottling devices, the best shoes, the best hotel rooms -- the best son, even if it has to be somebody else's!! -- and yet it also cheapens all these good things of life because it presents them as just that, nothing but things. As in so many wine movies, it all goes wrong. Wine is as hard to make a movie about as art, or music.

And so well before the moment comes we've long been poised for the other shoe to drop -- for Paul to get his comeuppance for being such a bastard of a dad and cheapening an ancestral wine business by reducing it to just a way to play out his mean selfishness. The festival blurb speaks of a "titanic" performance by Arestrup, but alas it is not. We may hope for other great performances from Arestrup, but this one is just what the simplistic screenplay calls for. He needs a part of more complexity to show what he can really do. Arestrup shows plenty of flash, but Chenais has more gravitas, and is more memorable for just one moment of true rage. Gilles Legrand, who has worked in TV and has not made a significant feature film, is many miles away from Jacques Audiard. This shiny bright movie with its surging music is readymade American art house kitsch boilerplate for seniors, but the lines are a little to clearly drawn even for them. However there is already talk of a US remake with a California setting, which is not far-fetched.

You Will Be My Son/Tu seras mon fils was released in France August 24, 2011 to so-so reviews (Allociné press rating 2.8 based on 17 critics, but the online audience vote was enthusiastic, 3.9, showing that this plays well with the general audience. In the US, this is a Cohen Media Group release. Screened for this review as part of the 2013 edition of the annual Unifrance-Film Society of Lincoln Center joint series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (Feb. 28-Mar. 10, 2013). North American premiere.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.