LA SAINTE FAMILLE/  THE HOLY FAMILY

France, 2019, 90 minutes, Colour.

Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Laura Smet, Marthe Keller, Lea Drucker, Inna Modja, ThIerry Godard.

Directed by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing.

This is very much a film for audiences with a distinctive French sensibility, perhaps, a Western European sensibility. It will probably not appeal or interest audiences with Anglo-Celtic sensibilities.

The title is ironic. The central character, a famous scientist with biology theories about reproduction and the mystery of the developing universe, seen lecturing to a rapt audience at the opening, is certainly not part of a holy family. He has a wife, pregnant, becoming more and more alienated from him, going off to Tangiers to supervise work on the harbour. They have a young daughter together and he has adopted an older girl.

The screenplay by the director and main star, is something of a dramatic jigsaw, introducing a range of characters, having them interact, revealing more and more about them, having them make offhand remarks giving the equivalent of lectures, raising all kinds of themes.

And in this family which is not wholly, the ageing grandmother is dominant, a past relationship revealed which alters relationships within the family, the family planning to move the grandmother in with her daughter who is worried and concerned about everyone, sending her son, the scientist, off to Barcelona for the funeral of the maid who brought them up. His brother is nervy, drinking, about to become a father, then revealed as homosexual breaking off from his partner. And there is a woman connected to the family, in Barcelona, but bought by the scientist’s mother back to France to make an inventory of the grandmother’s possessions – and the family coming in picking and choosing, the scientist having a sexual liaison.

The above paragraph may make the film more immediate coherent than it is as we watch.

The scientist is approached by a woman who knows him, is French with an African background, and makes an appointment for him with the government where he is appointed a government Minister with a focus on science and family. We don’t see much of him in this role because he is much more involved in personal matters, his mother, coping with his brother, intimate relationships with the woman from Barcelona, visits to his grandmother, panic attacks…

Very much for a Francophile audience.