Qu'un seul tienne et les autres suivront (2009)
Directed by Léa Fehner

Film Review

In what is surely one of the most spectacular directing debuts in recent years, Léa Fehner crafts a film of remarkable insight, potency and depth of feeling.  It's hard to believe that Fehner was just 28 when she made this film, such is the maturity she shows in her mise-en-scène and understanding of the workings of the human heart.  Qu'un seul tienne et les autres suivront (a.k.a. Silent Voice) is a powerful evocation of suffering, written and directed with as much compassion as panache, and faultlessly performed by some extremely gifted actors.  This is a film that can hardly fail to have a seismic impact on anyone who watches it, but hopefully it will not leave you in ruins.

The film follows the tragic trajectories of three very different characters who are destined to end up in the same place, the visiting room of a French prison.  Hoping to make some easy money, 30-something Stéphane enters into a Faustian pact by posing as a criminal he resembles.  A middle-aged mother, Zohra, travels from Algeria to France so that she can track down and confront her son's killer.  Laure is a 16-year-old whose romantic idyll ends disastrously when her boyfriend, an urban rebel, lands himself in prison.  The implacable walls of the prison where these three characters are brought together present not so much a physical barrier as an emotional one, one that which will stretch their inner resources to breaking point.

Fehner directs the film with something of the bleak austerity of her illustrious predecessors, Robert Bresson and Maurice Pialat.  The dull palette, which is limited to various tones of grey and blue, together with some tightly framed camerawork which relies heavily on close-ups, creates a palpable sense of confinement.  The main protagonists look as though they are trapped, imprisoned not in a physical sense, but in a psychological and spiritual sense.  Their social circumstances, their character flaws and the workings of chance have constructed for them a metaphysical cell from which they struggle to free themselves.  Ironically, it is the actual prison where they end up which will be the means of their deliverance.  

Qu'un seul tienne et les autres suivront is a spellbinding piece of cinema which feels like the unloved cousin of Jacques Audiard's Un prophète (released six months earlier to great acclaim). Whilst this latter film had been lavishly praised and recompensed with enough awards to sink an aircraft carrier, Léa Fehner's modest but equally effective film has passed virtually unnoticed.  Lacking the showy stylisation and cold cynicism of Audiard's gangster epic, Fehner's film has a simplicity that makes it more humane and accessible, and just as convincing in its depiction of prison regime.   The film's realism owes much to the fact that Léa Fehner once spent six months working as a volunteer for a prison support charity.

Whilst Fehner's writing and direction are admirable, the sheer visceral power of this film derives from the performances of her exceptional cast.  The one actor who stands out is Vincent Rottiers, who plays Laure's hot-headed boyfriend Alexandre with an almost feral intensity.  Rottiers has recently distinguished himself in two other films - Claude and Nathan Miller's Je suis heureux que ma mère soit vivante and Xavier Giannoli's A l'origine - and is emerging as the most exciting French actor of his generation.  Almost as impressive is Pauline Etienne, whose portrayal of the vulnerable teenager Laure is harrowing on an almost operatic scale.  The other members of the cast are by no means lacking in talent either, and their arresting contributions help to make this one of the most memorable and emotionally bruising films of the past year.  If this magnum opus is anything to go by, Léa Fehner and her lead actors are destined for great things.

Film Synopsis

At 30, Stéphane becomes depressed when he realises that his life is going nowhere.  When a stranger offers him a large sum of money in return for taking his friend's place in prison he readily accepts.  After learning that her son has been murdered, Zohra travels to France from Algeria to confront his killer.  Meanwhile, 16-year-old Laure is enjoying an idyllic love affair, but things turn sour when she learns she is pregnant and her boyfriend, Alexandre, is thrown into prison.  Fate brings these three people together in a prison visiting room.  Are they strong enough to cope with what fate has in store for them...?