Our Children
(2012)
Director: Joachim Lafosse
Stars: Emilie Dequenne, Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup
Short Review, no
spoilers
Based on true events, this psychological drama follows the
mental disintegration of a woman as she struggles to cope with an increasingly
claustrophobic and oppressive home environment. Muriel (Dequenne) is initially
young and in love with Mounir (Rahim) who she marries and starts a family with,
but their space is always shared from the beginning with Mounir’s adoptive
father, Andre. A sense of foreboding pervades the film from the outset, opening
as it does with the quietly sombre image of three white coffins being loaded on
to an airplane, and the weeping Muriel requesting from a hospital bed that they
be buried in Morocco. The drama is compelling throughout despite this
foreshadowing of the tragic and disturbing events that culminate at the end of
the film.
Full Review
(spoilers)
This is as sympathetic a portrayal of a woman who kills her
own children as you’re likely to get. However, it is perhaps because of this that
it is also not as challenging as it could be. Muriel’s breakdown as it is
depicted is understandable and genuinely heart-breaking, but as viewers we are
spared many of the gruesome details of the case on which it is based, making
the potential for sympathy much easier. Dequenne is also young and pretty in
striking contrast to the 42-year old housewife with birdlike features and the
look of a hysteric seen in courtroom photos of the real-life murderess.
This led me to consider the visual depiction of other female
killers, Charlize Theron for example, who was plastered in prosthetics in a
process of ‘uglification’ to more ‘realistically’ play Aileen Wuornos in
Monster, laughed out of the room as she would have been if she had played it in
her more familiar perfume advert form. In contrast, the casting of a younger,
more attractive actress than her real-life counterpart in a Belgian arthouse
film goes without note, when a major US film production courting Oscars would
never get away with such a thing.
Director of Our Children, Joachim Lafosse, has indeed spoken
of the ‘monstering’ of Genevieve Lhermitte (the crimes of which the film portrays)
in media reportage of the case, and his subsequent intention to bring depth and
understanding as to why a mother could commit such a terrible crime. This could
have been a worthwhile and fascinating project, but what if we compare to other
more complex ways of portraying female killers and their actions. Consider a
lonely, overweight woman’s confession to the murder and then grisly
dismemberment of her victim to an uncomfortable Philip Seymour Hoffman in Todd
Solondz’s Happiness. The build-up to her crime is tragic, telling a story of
sexual harassment and rape which initially seems to justify her actions. In
classic Solondz black humour however, Kristina gradually reveals the details of
her crime - how she powerfully bludgeoned Pedro to death, dismembered his body,
and disposed of his remains in ‘baggies’, all told as she tucks in to an ice
cream sundae. Tragedy morphs in to horror and then in to farce, turning Kristina
from pathetic victim in to a sociopathic murderer. In his own inimitable way, Solondz
shows us the dichotomy of a pitiful figure and the dastardly actions they
undertake in a tragicomic scenario, pointing
up the complications encountered when invited to engage sympathetically
with a murderer, rather than hiding them.
A more direct comparison can be made between Our Children
and A Cry in the Dark, another real-life case of a mother suspected of
infanticide put to feature film. In the latter, director Fred Schepisi’s
characterisation of Lindy Chamberlain, prime suspect in the notorious ‘dingo
baby’ case, reflects the problematic way she came across in the media at the
time of her trial and in doing so, also challenges the film viewer’s
perceptions of how guilty/innocent women ‘should’ behave. Muriel is presented
to us as nothing other than a tragic victim, whereas Lindy in A Cry in the Dark
is consistently shown as troubling and difficult to empathise with. Muriel is
guilty and Lindy is eventually found innocent, but Schepisi’s study is far more
interesting in that it highlights how such women are judged guilty or innocent
based on their behaviour and appearance. Unlike Schepisi, who repeatedly makes
it difficult for the viewer to identify with Lindy, Lafosse takes every step he
can to elicit sympathy for Muriel. This even goes as far as the murder scene
itself – to begin with, Lafosse reduces the number of children killed from five
to four and leaves the nasty business of the actual killings offscreen. As in
the real-life case, Muriel calls each child in to another room one by one, however
in the film we are spared the violent nature of the murders, which Lhermitte in
real life accomplished by slitting the throats of each child. Also like the
actual events, the last child to die is the eldest but, in the film, Lafosse chooses
to reduce the ages of the children. In real life, the eldest was 14 years old and
struggled with her mother before being stabbed repeatedly and succumbing to the
same fate as her four siblings. The significance of this is that the depiction
of older children more aware of what was happening to them was perhaps considered
too traumatic to show on screen, and would have problematised Lafosse’s project
of encouraging sympathy with Muriel. Instead, each young child is quietly led
to their demise in a sad but peaceful fashion, at odds with what would have
been a far more violent and horrifying scenario.
It is not that we need to see a tawdry recreation of such terrible
events and naturally, I don’t argue that the artistry of film should be weighed
down by historical fact, but it is nevertheless interesting to see what gets
omitted and why. Try imagining a depiction closer to the actuality, compare it
to this one here and it becomes apparent what Lafosse believes is necessary to
engage audience sympathy. It seems dubious to camouflage the tragedy of such
events, and I can’t help but feel that there are more interesting ways of
investigating such troublesome terrain.