“My father was a domestic tyrant for my mother, for me, in the house, by his violence”, reveals the French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Améris by evoking his childhood during the years 1960. By writing with Murielle Magellan then by putting on stage the autobiographical novel Fathers profession by Sorj Chalandon (Grasset, 2015), he had the impression of reading part of his own childhood story.
“Let’s say that reading it brought my journey to the surface,” he confesses. In Chalandon’s story, the father figure is a mythomaniac, veteran of the Algerian war who declares himself a former airplane pilot, ex-tenor of the Compagnons de la chanson, judo champion and other feats of arms. Under post-traumatic shock, he invents fictitious exploits in front of his boy, by dragging him into his delusions, even at the cost of his endangerment, by making him participate in an OAS commando to bring Algeria back to the French bosom by exterminating General de Gaulle. The twelve-year-old firmly believes in what the daddy tells him, before discovering that he is being fooled.
Améris has delivered a less violent adaptation, closer to the psychological drama than the novel with sometimes comical scenes, although the shots are also part of the celebration. Benoit Poelvoorde embodies there, with his explosive energy, his crack and his equivocal charm, the man of the house in front of whom his family trembles, but who leads the way by constantly posing as a victim while torturing his loved ones.
“The mechanism of psychological abuse is the subject of the film and the book,” says the filmmaker. I am a man of fiction, but when the subject spills over into the social, we are all splashed. These manipulative men are suffering and the mother’s silence is part of the problem. She lives in denial and actress Audrey Dana sort of played my own mother. Mine died three years ago and my father forbade her to go out with a friend at the time. She was under his control and had accepted him. We shot in Lyon, the setting of my childhood and where Sorg Chalandon lived for a long time. “
In the fireplace
With The emotional anonymous, Profession from father constitutes in his eyes his most personal film. “I would like the children of today to draw consolation from him,” says Jean-Pierre Améris. In the films I saw when I was 13, 14, I had found a wonderful ideal shelter. And I loved horror cinema, which echoed the fear I felt at home. My father used to say: “The world is violent. The cinema helps to understand it, especially when you come from a modest background ”. “
He had already staged the exuberant Belgian actor in 2015 in the remarkable The emotional anonymous, then in A family for rent five years later. “This time, I had as references the figures of Alberto Sordiet by Vittorio Gassman, capable of playing monsters with humanity. Poelvoorde joined this troop of madmen who are not afraid to embrace the excess of the worst human faults. . He asked me: “Did you get that father?” In fact, one day, you have to know how to detach yourself and finally see your parents as poor anguished and frustrated people. “
The mechanism of psychological abuse is the subject of the film and the book. I am a man of fiction, but when the subject spills over into the social, we are all splashed. These manipulative men are suffering and the mother’s silence is part of the problem. She lives in denial and actress Audrey Dana sort of played my own mother.
Everything happens at the height of a child, between admiration, fear and love for this all-powerful man whom life gave to the young boy as a father.
In order to play little Émile, he chose Jules Lefebvre, spotted in the thriller Duels of the Belgian OlivierMasset-Depasse in 2018. “Benoît said he had found in him one of his best playing partners. They were laughing together. I thought a lot about 400 shots of François Truffaut by directing the boy. He had to have fun playing by feeling and transmitting emotions with sincerity. Children are heroes. They take it all over their heads. “
Largely set behind closed doors in an apartment, but also at school, in the streets of Vieux-Lyon themselves apparently cut off from the outside world, the film portrays a smother.
This apartment, Améris saw it a bit like that of the Tenant of Polanski, but also as the house of The Conjuring 2, a horror film by James Wan released in 2016, where demonic entities terrify a family. This diffuse fear in a child’s head can have a real or phantasmagorical origin; no matter. It is this feeling that the filmmaker sought to translate. Fathers profession represented for Jean-Pierre Améris his own relationship with confinement. “Sometimes, the home, this place in principle reassuring, becomes the theater of anguish”, he sums up.
The film Fathers profession hits theaters on November 12.