A Loving Father
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Gérard Depardieu, Guillaume Depardieu, Julien Boisselier, Noémie Kocher, Sylvie TestudBrand: TLA Releasing
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); English (Original Language); French (Original Language); Swedish (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 103 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-05-18
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: TLA Releasing
Movie Reviews of A Loving Father
Movie Review: An unhappy family falls completely apart, all for the better
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a story of a long conflicted family in which a series of events allows three members of the family to make breaks with the past and move foward.
Leo Shepard, played by Gerard Depardieu, is a French novelist who has just won the Nobel Prize in literature. He is a rugged rural farmer, a dominating father to his daughter and son-in-law, and a womanizer who dominates a string of women who worship him over the years.
His daughter, Virginie, played by Sylvie Testud, has devoted her life to her father, ensuring that everything around him supports him in his writing. She had devoted her life to his talent. In her efforts to create an atmosphere where he can create, she has become obsessive and anorexic. She longs to see the secret manuscript he has supposedly been writing for the last 3 years.
His son, Paul, played by Guillaume Depardieu, is a conflicted soul. As a child he was ignored by his writing obsessed father, beat or punished when he demanded attention, frightened of his father's anger and dominance, and eventually the creator of a 'show-down' to determine whether his father loved his son more than his art. The child Paul destroys a novel that his father had been writing for 5 years. His father nearly drowns him in anger. The child is pulled from the blue ink stained tub by his mother as crippled damaged goods.
All this pain and tension comes to a climax when Leo wins the Nobel prize and decides to take his motorcycle to Stockholm to get his prize. Along the way a series of odd events allows Paul to kidnap his father and give the world the impression that his father had died.
The father and son verbally stab at each other and it is revealed that the son has recovered from years of heroin addiction and alcoholism and is now successful. The father has gradually lost his creative powers. Just as important however is the fact that the son is now able to accept that his father chose his art over his son and that this was not the child's fault.
When they are discovered by the daughter, she must confront the fact that she also has been ignored even though she was always with her father. She has devoted her life to him when in fact he has not written a word in the last 3 years. She has sacrificed for his art, and there is no product.
Virginie is a hysterically neurotic young woman and she jumps overboard in despair. She is saved by her brother Paul, as her father hesitates. Paul emerges from the cold water with Virginie in a new world, different from the life he lead after his mother pulls him from the blue ink bathtub. He has confronted his father, accepted that he is not at fault for wanting love and affection as a child, and he is able to allow his father to play the charade of finding a new existence since he finds it very refreshing to be dead and no longer required to write. Even Virginie is able to let go of her father, to lionize his once great talent, but to let the spent shell move on.
At times the film is flawed with Testud's melodramatic over-acting but the Depardieus were excellent.
Summary of A Loving Father
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