Eugène Green is an international treasure: an American-born French film-maker who, like Manoel De Oliveira, absorbs the stylised, rarefied elegance of classical theatre and brings it to movies about the present day. The Portuguese Nun (2009) was a gem of gentle comedy, and his new drama, The Son of Joseph, has the same droll innocence and lovability. With its carefully controlled, decelerated dialogue, it is weirdly moving in just the same way. Again, it has something of Rivette or Rohmer, and like Ozu (or Wes Anderson), he uses that most eccentric technique – direct sightlines into camera.
Vincent (Victor Ezenfis) is a lonely teenage boy, alienated from his peers. We first see him walking away when a couple of charmless schoolfriends start tormenting a rat in a cage. (The closing credits assure us that the rat, named Gargantua, finished shooting unharmed.) Vincent discovers that his single mum, Marie (Natacha Régnier), was impregnated and virtually abandoned 16 years before by the arrogant publisher and Parisian man-about-town Oscar Pormenor, played hilariously by Mathieu Amalric. Vincent’s furious obsession with Oscar ends up with him befriending Oscar’s equally angry and dispossessed brother Joseph, played by Dardennes stalwart Fabrizio Rongione. Joseph falls in love with Marie, and the names of Victor’s mum and quasi-dad achieve a new significance. There is an amusing turn from Maria de Medeiros as Violette Tréfouille, a ditsy literary critic and serial party invitee.
