Our Children (2012)

 

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.