Film: Custody
By Tom Browne
This devastating family drama is an early contender for film of the year.
Every so often, a filmmaker emerges who displays a talent and feel for cinema far beyond his years. Custody, the first full-length offering from French writer/director Xavier Legrand, may be the most absorbing debut since Todd Field’s In the Bedroom, a concise and compelling drama that goes about its business with minimum fuss and maximum economy. As a calling card, it’s pretty hard to beat; as an acting showcase, it’s damn near flawless.
The opening scene sets the tone: rival lawyers present the two sides in a child-custody dispute to an expert panel as the parents look on. Scraps of information (the marital breakdown, the son’s testimony, accusations and counter-accusations) gradually fill in the background, while the estranged couple – Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and Miriam (Léa Drucker) – sit brooding in the middle, barely exchanging a glance, let alone a word.
As with the rest of the film, it demonstrates Legrand’s remarkable ability to create tension in confined spaces without ever resorting to melodrama or contrivance. This is clearly a relationship well beyond salvage, but the emotions that led to its breakdown are simmering close to the surface, ready to break out. A great deal of credit must go to the actors – Miriam is a combination of world-weariness and fear, while Antoine is a bundle of barely controlled rage, struggling (and failing) to convince the world that he has a lid on things.
Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the scenes Antoine shares with his son Julien (a stunning performance from newcomer Thomas Gioria), in which weekend visitations turn into a traumatic battle of wills. This is a boy being forced to grow up far too quickly, torn between a desire to push back against his abusive dad and the sheer terror of provoking him. At one point, when Antoine pressures Julien to reveal the location of his estranged wife’s new flat, he plaintively replies, “I don’t want you to hit Mum.”
Antoine’s flashes of anger (punching a car headrest, flinging Julien’s backpack, grabbing his arm) hint at all the violence we haven’t seen, while building tension for potential violence to come. He is even more threatening when trying to show affection, not least because Julien and Miriam shrink from his hugs in the same way – it’s implied – that they once shrank from his fists. When the inevitable climax arrives – one of the most expertly controlled scenes you will see this year – the audience’s emotional buy-in makes it almost unbearable.
There’s also a nicely observed subplot involving Julien’s teenage sister Joséphine (Mathilde Auneveux), a girl young enough to feel the pain of her parents’ separation, but also in the throes of her first serious relationship – one that allows her an escape that’s denied to others. Her mother looks upon her with both tenderness and apprehension, recognising the excitement of embryonic love, but terrified that her daughter might make the same mistakes as her.
Custody is a work of great sensitivity, one that observes its characters from ground level and avoids glib answers. Much like Loveless, another standout from this year’s releases, it dissects the pain of children cut adrift in an adult world, one in which Miriam’s desperate plea – “We just want peace” – seems far too much to ask for. The viewer, on the other hand, could hardly ask for more.
Published by Saga, April 2018.