Beau-père (1981)
Directed by Bertrand Blier

Film Review

For more than thirty years, writer-director Bertrand Blier has been busy hacking his way through the undergrowth of middleclass morality, proving himself the worthiest claimant of that well-worn title, the Enfant Terrible of French cinema.  Blier's deep fascination for the darkier, seedier aspects of human experience has allowed him to craft some of the most provocative and original films of the past few decades, even if some of them seem to be contrived primarily to arouse the bourgeois prejudices of the less liberal-minded critics and to give his distributors recurring nightmares.   Beau-père is Blier's most unashamedly controversial film, one that tackles, with rare frankness and maturity, the two great taboos of our age: incest and paedophilia.  One of the reasons why the film is so shocking in retrospect is the ease with which it manages to get the spectator to suspend his or her moral judgement and see that a liaison between a thirty-year old man and a teenage girl can be both tragic and beautiful, not merely morally repugnant.

Adapting his own novel (as he previously did on his hit debut feature Les Valseuses), Bertrand Blier tacitly avoids the sensationalist trap that director Adrian Lyne would fall into with his scandalous Lolita (1997), which treads similar ground far more clumsily.  Instead, he paints a delicate portrait of illicit love that is devoid of both moral judgement and exploitative gimmickry.  Beau-père is not the most comfortable film to watch, as it broaches themes which fill most of us with revulsion, but Blier's handling of his subject matter is so nuanced and intelligent, the performances from the two principals so engaging and truthful, that it stands as the director's most compelling and incisive works.  It is not the role of art to kowtow to the narrow confines of contemporary morality, but rather to open our eyes and help us to see a little further than our natural prejudices will allow - in this the film succeeds admirably.

Even with Blier's flair for intelligent screenwriting, Beau-père would still have been a hard-sell were it not for the extraordinarily rich performances from the two leads, Patrick Dewaere and Ariel Besse.  As the burned out musician whose paedophilic tendencies are all too evident (albeit subtly rendered), Dewaere retains our sympathies by virtue of the tragic poignancy he invests in his character.  His character is not an evil pervert, but a weak man whose lack of moral fibre and sense of adult responsibility make him easy prey for the precocious teenage girl whom Fate has thrown into his arms.   If anything, it is Dewaere's character Rémi who is the victim of the piece, the one we end up having more sympathy for.  Ariel Besse's Marion, a modern Lolita who sees absolutely nothing wrong in luring her guardian into an unseemly love affair, would likewise have been deserving of our censure had it not been for the skill with which the actress displays her character's feelings and motivations.  Hard to believe that this was Besse's screen debut, and perhaps even harder to believe that she gave up acting after two subsequent films and now works as a postmistress.  As for Dewaere, he committed suicide (for reasons which are still unaccounted for), within a year of working on this film, a tragic end to the most promising of acting careers.  The film's other notable actor, Maurice Ronet, would also die before his time,  from cancer in 1983 - his portrayal here is poignantly reminiscent of the one he gave in Louis Malle's Le Feu follet (1963).

Beau-père is a film that could only have been made in France in the early 1980s, when attitudes towards illicit sex were far more relaxed than they are today.  Even then, the film was ill-received in some quarters and had difficulty finding a distributor in some countries, most notably the United States.  In France, the film was widely praised by the critics and proved to be a surprising commercial success, attracting an audience of over one million.  It was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1981 and earned Patrick Dewaere his fifth nomination for the Best Actor César in 1982 (an award which sadly eluded the actor).  Today, the issue of paedophilia is such a sensitive one that no director would dare to make a film like this (and even if he did the likelihood is that no distributor would touch it).  What does this say about the health of today's film industry - that avenues of human life are excluded because they are deemed just too socially and morally unacceptable to risk putting in front of an audience?  Beau-père is certainly a challenging film, one that tackles a modern taboo with compassion and a breathtaking directness, but is it not far better to be cognizant of the situation that it depicts than merely to shut our eyes and pretend that such things do not happen?  Ignorance may be bliss, but it does not necessarily make us better or wiser people.

Film Synopsis

Rémi is a failed 30-something musician who ekes out a meagre existence playing the piano in upmarket nightclubs and restaurants.  After eight years, his wife Martine is ready to leave him and the one bright spot in his life is his 14-year-old stepdaughter Marion, whom he regards as his own child.  When Martine is killed in a car accident, Rémi and Marion's relationship is strengthened and they become inseparable.  Marion refuses to go back to her father, a businessman struggling with alcoholism, and instead insists on staying with Rémi.  The arrangement works out well until the fateful day when Marion tells her stepfather that she is infatuated with him and wants nothing more than to sleep with him...