For the close-knit and loving French family at the center of directors Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s intensely intimate new drama, The Quiet Son ( Jouer avec le feu ), home is where the heart is, and politics are probably best left at the doorstep.
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Unfortunately, the opposite winds up happening to hardworking single dad Pierre (Vincent Lindon) when his oldest son, Fus (Benjamin Voisin), veers far to the right, joining a band of radical thugs committing violent acts around the neighborhood.
How do you stop a child from pursuing political beliefs that are diametrically opposed to yours — beliefs that could be dangerous? Is it better to let them follow their own path, in the hopes that they’ll eventually come around? Or do you try and intervene at some point, with the risk of pushing them even further in the wrong direction?
Those are the questions guiding the Coulins’ gripping and well-performed fourth feature, adapted from the 2020 novel by Laurent Petitmangin. Following the surge of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party in recent French elections, The Quiet Son couldn’t be a more timely effort. After premiering in competition at Venice, it will hopefully garner some appreciation overseas.
Set in France’s Grand Est region, where decades of rising unemployment have opened the doors to a wave of far-right radicalism, the story follows Pierre, Fus and his younger brother, Louis (Stefan Crepon), over several months that see them drifting perilously apart.
It all starts with an amateur soccer game that Fus wins for the local team — soccer being a major pastime and rallying point for French nationalists in towns like theirs. (A similar scene can be found at the end of Lucas Belvaux’s This Is Our Land , which tracked the rise of a National Front candidate in northern France.) After the game, Pierre goes to congratulate Fus in the locker room, only to find several fascist-looking lads — shaved heads, bomber jackets, tattoos, etc. — palling around with his son.
From then on things spiral out of control, although the Coulin sisters take their time to observe all the gradual changes in behavior between Pierre and his two sons, who themselves are near polar opposites. Fus is a charming, athletic bad boy who still lives at home at the age of 22. He never went to regular college and is pursuing a technical degree to become a metal worker. Louis, on the other hand, is pale, skinny and shy. But he’s also one of the best students in his graduating high school class. With the help of his father, he’s been applying to universities in Paris to study literature.
It would be easy for the directors to paint Pierre’s household as a place of constant tension and antagonism, but at the start of the film that’s far from the case. What we witness at first is a loving family of three men who support one another whenever they can, trying to fill the emotional abyss left by a mother who died well before the movie starts.
But as Fus falls deeper into the hands of his radical buddies, Pierre discovers a world that a proudly leftist blue-collar worker like himself had previously been unaware of. In one telling sequence, he follows his son to an abandoned factory filled with skinheads lifting weights and engaging in MMA combat, like some kind of fascist French fight club.
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When Pierre tries to confront his son, which he does on several occasions, the gulf only widens between them. “We’re just cannon fodder!” Fus shouts at his dad, explaining how his metallurgy degree is worthless since there’s no work out there anyway. The directors contrast that reality with Pierre’s steady job as a nighttime SNCF technician fixing train tracks, in what looks like the last remnant of France’s glorious industrial past.
Lindon has played working-class characters many times before in his long career, most recently in films like At War and The Measure of a Man — both directed by Stéphane Brizé — that chronicled the contemporary struggles of French laborers. He therefore fits naturally into the role of Pierre, a man who works nights so he can raise his sons in the daytime, but inevitably finds one of them pulling away from him.
The Coulins are careful to underline that this is no fault of Pierre’s, but rather, of a place and time where many young men have gone down the same political path as Fus (whose name is short for fussball , which is what his German mother used to call him).
Tensions rise further when Fus has a run-in with radical leftists who appear to be as violent as the skinheads. He comes back home so battered that he needs to be hospitalized, and Pierre is right there by his side at every moment. We think, or at least hope, that this will mark the end of Fus’ far-right activity, that he has finally learned his lesson. But he ends up slipping from his father’s grip entirely, and tragedy strikes.
Voisin, who gave a breakout performance in the 2021 Balzac adaptation Lost Illusions , incarnates Fus’ many contradictions with explosive restraint. In some scenes he can be playful and seductive — a fun-loving older brother who likes to hang out, make jokes and lay around watching sports on TV. And in others he becomes deeply introverted or offensive, acting like a wounded animal constantly lashing out at those around him.
The one person Fus avoids hurting is Louis, whom the talented Crepon ( The Bureau ) portrays with subtlety and tenderness. As the sole member of the family who will make it out of their rust-belt town, Louis represents the dreams of Pierre and the thwarted opportunities of Fus, but both support him at all costs. Perhaps the most heartbreaking scene in The Quiet Son (a better title than the French one, which translates to Playing with Fire ) is when Louis gets ready to move to his tiny new apartment in Paris, but there’s no room left in the car for Fus, who misses out on his brother’s big moment.
The directors intercut these tough moments with displays of joyous camaraderie, such as a graduation party for Louis where everyone dances to old time rock ‘n’ roll. But even then, Fus finds himself cast aside when he learns from someone else about Louis’ college plans. Driven in one direction while his family heads the other way, veering right while they go left, he winds up going beyond the point of no return. And what started off as something political becomes something deeply and painfully personal.
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