Is Their Children After Them the B side of L’amour Ouf?

Can the success of one benefit the other? Gilles Lellouche stars in this film which has a lot in common with his last production. And for good reason: he was initially supposed to develop this adaptation of Goncourt into a TV series…

While Phew Love by Gilles Lellouche, a gleaming adolescent melodrama in pro-eighties France, has far exceeded 4 million entries, one can legitimately wonder if Their children after them by Zoran and Ludovic Boukherma, a gleaming teenage melodrama in pro-league France of the nineties, will benefit from this tremendous ripple effect.

This adaptation of the 2018 Goncourt Prize by Nicolas Mathieu (more than 400,000 novels sold) tells over several summers the intersecting and brutal journey of Anthony (Paul Kircher) and Hacine (Sayyid El Alami), two sons of former workers of factory, in a valley in eastern France. Lellouche, who initiated the project (which he initially intended to develop as a series), is content here to play comedy. Hence this somewhat strange feeling of doubling for the director-actor, as he told us last September just before the release of his Love Phew :

“ Two days ago, I was in Venice to present the film by the Boukherma brothers, Their children after themin which I also play. There, we are no longer in schizophrenia, we are squarely in the multiverse. »

Their children after them, a sanitized adaptation of Goncourt

Bright gray

What multiverse is he talking about? That of a territory that is a priori not very soluble in a French cinema which prefers to film the city of lights populated by “nepo-babies” rather than the gray valleys of the France of roundabouts, that of the crisis, of the yellow vests, of unemployment, of the National Rally vote, with the backdrop of factories emptied of their workers drinking beers between two meetings at Employment center. This is how it has been since “large” city ​​we like to imagine the inhabitants of this France which is logically tired of being caricatured.

But here and there, the precise spatio-temporal anchoring allows us to fantasize the supposed electricity of the 80s and 90s while avoiding dealing with the fractures of a present which will always refuse to take a break. In Phew LoveLellouche under the guise of paying homage to “without ranks” push the knobs to the max using all the handle effects to make the gray luminous. Pop film with ad hoc soundtrack, romantic heroes, rebellious children who don't care about the crisis. Just as there is the North of Dumont with its clumsy cops and its brutal savages, there is that of Lellouche and its flashy neon lights which mask the poverty. Here comes the Grand Est of the Boukherma brothers:

“ The idea does not come from us but from Gilles Lellouche. He offered us, in 2022, to adapt this novel with him with a view to a seriesexplains Ludovic Boukherma in an interview with the CNC. We hadn't read it but the universe was familiar to us. The France that Nicolas Mathieu depicts evokes, in fact, the one in which we grew up. There are great similarities between the East of the blast furnaces of the novel and our rural South-West, starting with this absence of perspectives that we felt as adolescents. Finally, we come from the same modest background as the characters. »

Ample staging

Gilles Lellouche had seen and loved their teddy (2020), a country werewolf film and in particular their way of looking at the working classes “ without contempt or angelism », Specifies Zoran in the same interview. Originally, the brothers were hired to write a series. But once Lellouche was definitively monopolized by his Love Phewthe brothers suggested to their producers Hugo Selignac and Alain Attal (the same as the Lellouche film), if they could instead make a feature film.

The brothers thought, in fact, that Nicolas Mathieu's novel, generous in its romantic breath, deserved the big screen. Hence this idea of ​​using ample staging to fetishize their characters (filmed like divinities) and the landscapes (the blast furnaces become cathedrals). Here and there, the ” TRUE “ world is nothing more than a setting.

“ Nicolas Mathieu, through his prose, managed to digress and precisely describe the character of these social classesadds Ludovic Boukherma, still at the CNC. When reading, it's very beautiful. Visually, it was impossible. Filming these blast furnaces stopped in the middle of the city was expressive enough… »

Adolescence is well known to devour everything, starting with the social soil from which they were born. In Their children after themGilles Lellouche plays the young hero's discarded father, a tired man – half-rough, half-brute – who, once disguised with a prosthesis (special effect assumed), will become this pathetic monster that the camera didn't want to see anyway.

Phew Love And Their children after themtwo tracks, the same atmosphere. It remains to be seen whether the strength of one's romance will not overwhelm the less flashy strength of the other.

Their children after them. By Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma. With: Paul Kircher, Angelina Woreth, Sayyid El Alami…. Duration: 2h21.

L’Amour Ouf, a romantic kamikaze fresco