Save your money for something good and enjoyable

A Disappointing Continuation

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Depression is a terrible thing. The opening scene of 'My Children' tells us that an awful thing has happened, and the rest of the movie provides the background to the tragedy. It's a slow-paced film, and for much of its length, it feels too slow-paced for its own plot: it's not easy to see how the status quo is going to descend into tragedy within the allotted time. In the event, the end is sudden and not directly provoked: the cause is rather internal, the final snapping of its protagonist amid inner despair. Nonetheless, depression can be induced by real-world causes, and the film is actually, aside from its dramatic conclusion, an intriguing study of a subtly abusive relationship between an elderly doctor who in effect adopted a Moroccan family. In return for his generosity, he sought control, more control than any one person should have over the lives of others. Director Joachim Lafosse strangely shoots many scenes through out-of-focus doorways, a stylistic tic that I didn't quite understand; but this a powerful study nonetheless, a disturbing portrait of a family life that is superficially idyllic, but somehow not right nonetheless

I have to say, I was quite curious while viewing this film, being Belgian and interested in local/European (non-extra-commercial) cinema.What a disappointment this turned out to be. Just like another reviewer already wrote it, the introduction is just too long for the viewers to forget it quickly, which keeps you waiting during the whole movie what is going to happen and who is going to do it.The movie itself sends you on different paths, until in the end, you realize the movie was not about who or what, but about how, and you realize you've been watching a movie about oppression in its worst stereotype.Is this film real? Does this film offer you any tools to get out of this kind of situation? The "male oppression" as depicted in this movie is certainly something which exists; every male in this movie uses authority to apply his rules and laws, and even opinions (in the case of André with Mounir, he clearly states he will not allow other options but living with him).We live in a society governed by authority and this film, in the end, reinforces the feeling of helplessness. We are not helpless; this movie and its message are horrible. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone; it left me with a feeling of artificial disaster, useless drama. It felt as if I should have never watched this movie, I sold the DVD ASAP.

Two arcs propel Joachim Lafosse's remarkable Our Children. The most obvious and significant is the heroine Murielle's decline from a beautiful, loving, young spirit to a depressed, oppressed, despairing drudge. She proves the dictum, Biology is destiny. From her honeymoon through her four child bearings she loses her sense of self, her liberty, her control over her life. Her last action is her tragic resolve to save her three daughters and one son from their being ruined by the sexist, patriarchal system that destroyed her. Unable to grant them liberty she gives them death. Though her Moroccan husband Mounir claims he doesn't want to raise his daughters in his sexist homeland, Murielle is destroyed by a European patriarch in Belgium. Dr. Pinget provides the antithetic arc. His apparent generosity and care are gradually exposed as heartless self-serving power and authority. Having married a young Moroccan woman, he leaves her in her homeland but brings one of her brothers, then eventually the other, to Europe variously to serve him. When his hopes to have Mounir join his medical practice are dashed, he hires him for office work. He pays for Mounir and Murielle's honeymoon, then agrees to join them. He shares his house with them, then to keep them buys them an estate where he again lives with them. His callousness towards Murielle drives her tragedy. The tension between the Moroccan family and the fat, hedonistic, impotent but suffocatingly powerful white European doctor adds another compelling theme. This domestic tragedy is also a parable for European colonialism. The white power insinuates itself into its colony, funds it, wins its trust and affection, imposes its own culture, but for all its pretense of generosity and care insists on dominating it and imposing its will. Any move to independence is suppressed as an affront to nature and to reason. (The film's original French title is A Prendre la raison, or Insanity.) That ruthless power is what the male patriarchy shares with the European colonial tradition.The film opens with a woman crying, begging that her four children be buried in Morocco. So it's a whodunit. Except here the killer is the true victim. For more see www.yacowar.blogspot.com.

A KVIFF screening, from French director Joachim Lafosse, before now the film has won a BEST ACTRESS award (for Émilie Dequenne) in UN CERTAIN REGARD competition in this year's Cannes. It is an unsettling drama concerns a tragedy which would be quite a mind-shocker. The film begins with the wife lying in the hospital bed (clearly after some severe accident) and mumbling that her children should be buried in Morocco, so during the subsequent truth-revealing narrative, viewers are practically preparing ourselves to undertake a tremendous calamity (my speculation is a car accident), but the film will deliver a much stronger and crueler blow, the actual long-takes of the massacre are done in an eerily tranquil restraint (considerably withdrawn from the actual execution). The foci are on the bizarre triangular relationship among three people, Mounir, a young Moroccan man and his French wife Murielle, live with elderly André a rich French doctor who had a paper marriage arrangement with Mounir's mother, so he could bring Mounir with him, and provide a job for him to work in his private clinic. So technically Mounir-André's quasi father- son bond has a deeper root (than Murielle, the clear intruder could imagine) although they are no blood linkage. Later, when their children consequently arriving in this world, step-by-step Murielle finds herself suffocated by the temporal life (possibly postpartum depression), and eagerly sways Mounir to go back to Morocco with their family, to start their life anew. But thing is slipping to an abyss when André cannot risk losing them and Mounir relies too much on him (both economically and psychologically) as well. Until the confrontation between Murielle and André finally occurs, the tragedy is inescapable.A heavy string score is predestined to the solemn tenor, the film is a trifle long-haul (a 111 minute running time) and the transitions of the characters' mental activities are either too abrupt or too hackneyed, but Émilie Dequenne for sure has been splendidly extraordinary in her devastating role, her self-destroy interpretation is powerful enough to propel the story against its ill-fated destiny. The A PROPHET (2009, a 9/10) pair, Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup are sharing their leading status as the other two angles of the triangle hazard, and overtly the latter has a meatier presence. There is a chafed undertone against the main plot, which I dare not to sidestep, the legality of paper marriage may not be the crux behind the tragedy, but nevertheless plays an influential part of the contemporary immigrant quandary.