A Kid (Le fils de Jean)
Matthieu (Pierre Deladonchamps) just received the call that his father died. The father he never met. The father he didn’t even really knew existed. The father he couldn’t meet in life but now must get to know in death. His mother always told him that Matthieu was the result of a one-night stand. But the affair was much more complicated than that.
Matthieu travels from France to Quebec for the funeral and there he meets his uncle Pierre (Gabriel Arcand). Pierre is the only other person who knew of Matthieu’s existence. And now it’s his job to introduce him to a family that wasn’t expecting him. Matthieu meets his brothers Ben (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) and Sam (Patrick Hivon)—two headstrong men who are at each other’s throats and totally disinterested in their new brother. He then meets Bettina (Catherine De Lean) is the estranged sister-in-law who develops a fondness for Matthieu. And then there is Angie (Marie-Therese Fortin). The wife who was completely unaware her husband had an affair in the first place but who sees Matthieu as the solution to alleviating some familial tensions.
What complicates matters is that there is no body. Matthieu’s father went on a fishing trip with Pierre and disappeared. The men all travel to the lake on a recovery mission. Ben and Sam want to find the body in order to secure their inheritance. Pierre just wants to put his brother to rest. And Matthieu is caught in the middle of it all.
Directed by Philippe Lioret and based on the novel by Jean-Paul Dubois, Le fils de Jean is a poignant family drama about self-discovery and navigating complicated family dynamics. While the circumstances are particularly unusual, anyone who has either felt like an outsider in their own family or has experienced any type of familial revelation will empathize with Matthieu’s plight. I’m not fully versed in the lingering tensions between the French and the Quebecois but viewers will get a little sense of that here. I was particularly taken with Gabriel Arcand’s performance as the family’s emotional anchor. Deladonchamps’s performance is perhaps a little too subdued but he seems to gain more traction with the movie’s heartfelt ending.
