Ellias leads a dream life. A Quebecer expatriated to Paris, he has just been promoted to head of a major haute couture house. In the fashion world, we’re fighting for it. Absorbed by his new collection, he is forced to return home following the death of a father with whom he had cut ties. However, there, his life quickly turned into a nightmare. Praised seven years ago for its remarkable To the hiltFrench filmmaker Xavier Legrand is finally back with The successor, which again explores the theme of male violence, but in a more insidious way. As a sinking antihero, Marc-André Grondin delivers one of the best performances of his career.
Gripping psychological suspense, The successor is a film about which the less we know, the better. With that in mind, let’s just say that once back in the father’s fold from which he did everything to escape, Ellias makes a discovery that could compromise his precious success.
Indeed, the father’s past actions come back to haunt the son, forcing the latter to improvise in order not to be splashed. Thinking first of his reputation and, by extension, his privileged status, Ellias quickly exhibits a cowardly and narcissistic nature.
With surgical precision, Xavier Legrand dissects the behavior of his protagonist, who makes a series of bad decisions made for the wrong reasons.
Implicitly, the filmmaker is interested in patriarchal excesses. Far from riding the zeitgeist, Xavier Legrand makes the concept of patriarchy one of the central concerns of his film. This, as much through what the father bequeathed to his son, literally and figuratively, as through the surname that Ellias once chose to change, in a symbolic rejection loaded with meaning.
As for the male violence mentioned from the outset, it manifests itself in the film in two distinct types of objectification of women: literal in the case of the father and devious in the case of the son. Let us deliberately avoid specifying what the first is about here.
As for the second, let’s just mention this very ingenious sequence where Ellias determines which of a string of models will pose alongside him on the cover of a magazine. Beneath the apparent harmlessness of professional discourse, one observation: as far as Ellias is concerned, these lovely young women are only accessories, and therefore objects.
Spitting image
Xavier Legrand’s film is full of such moments which show one thing, on the surface benign, but signify another, more worrying one.
The plot is also punctuated by clever false leads and ambiguous innuendoes. Take Dominique, the character that Yves Jacques aptly embodies. Presenting himself as a friend of Ellias’ father, Dominique displays such kindness that she becomes suspicious.
Very black, The successor takes into account several elements specific to what we call, in a somewhat catch-all designation, genre cinema. Except that, again, this is a false lead. That is to say, Xavier Legrand’s film only takes on the trappings of a thriller to better reveal, underneath, a relentless study of morals.
In other words, it’s cinematic haute couture disguised as ready-to-wear, to use an analogy in line with Ellias’ profession. Ellias who, on the outside, is the exact opposite of his father, but who, on the inside, is the spitting image of him…