The magnificent French film The real family, showing on our screens and filmed in Brittany, could just as well take place here. Because the stories of host families with their share of drama and beauty are familiar to us. Filmmaker Fabien Gorgeart explains in an interview with To have to from Paris to have been inspired by a drama of attachment that occurred at home in his childhood, by bringing fictional aspects to it.
His parents had taken in a little boy, brought up like his brother, who stayed at home between his eighteen months and his six years. His mother was deeply attached to him, and everyone loved him, but one day the natural father wanted to get him back… Drama in the house!
In his first feature film, Diane has the shoulders (2017), the filmmaker recounted the journey of a surrogate mother called upon to separate from the child she was carrying. The film was well received in France and he added this mirror work to it. “ Diane has the shoulders encouraged me to talk about the maternal bond again, which is not always what you think, ”he confides.
This time, he wanted to go more frankly, by grafting on to his family that of the little boy now placed at the heart of the film. “I also wanted to talk about the natural father who wants to find his place while the surrogate mother suffers in her flesh to see the one she considers her son go away. I was scarred by the presence of this child among us. We were lost. What to do ? Loving, but not too much… The problem of the emotional distance to be taken is very real. »
Make way for the “intruder”
The film is divided into two parts. The camera first appears mobile then, when the dramatic tension sets in, the eye adheres more to Anna’s point of view (the mother), torn when the natural father demands the child more and more often.
In the center of The real family : Mélanie Thierry (awarded at Angoulême), exceptional in Anna upset by the separation. “Beyond her performances as an actress, she is in the truth, with this something in her way of speaking which gives the character a popular side, specifies Fabien Gorgeart. Between Anna and little Simon, the contact was obvious. The dynamics of the maternal figure, I knew it by heart. Still, that of the natural father did not interest me too much at first. »
The filmmaker was looking for a new way to give body and life to this man who seemed to them an intruder, getting out of Anna’s blinders. Thanks to Félix Moati’s interpretation, he had the feeling of better showing their parallel paths: “They have two ways of loving this child. »
Learn to let go
Lyes Salem, who plays Anna’s husband, impressed the filmmaker who fleshed out the role for him. As for the little Gabriel Pavie, he was discovered in wild audition to camp Simon. “I saw a six-year-old child become an actor before my eyes. He had to do several takes, but in the end, we always got what we needed. In the crucial nightmare scene, I asked him to improvise and then we went back to the script. He had learned to let go. »
With this film, the filmmaker admits to having acquired a more complex look at this childhood bond which bruised him. “What a family is and becomes is already the same thing. The relationship we have with our own parents is also changing. I wanted to weave a fiction that corresponds to what I felt, showing what a real family was for us, while letting other voices express themselves. This story is a drama but not a tragedy. »
A patient and moving film