‘The Quiet Son (Jouer avec le feu)’ Review: We’ve Seen This Vincent Lindon-led French Family Drama Before | Venice

Pierre (Vincent Lindon) is a fifty-something single father who works night shifts for the SNCF (the French railway) as a mechanic/engineer and spends his free time with two sons, 22-year-old Fus (Benjamin Voisin) and 20-year-old Louis (Stefan Crepon). Every morning after work, he has coffee in a quiet kitchen and seems to know better than to demand too much of his sons. A rather harmonious family of three is at the center of The Quiet Son, the Venice 2024 Competition Entry by French directors Delphine and Muriel Coulin, set in Villerupt, a small town near the France–Luxembourg border. The ‘small-town’ part is crucial here, as the family’s capsulated existence becomes more clearly outlined against the backdrop of a place of diversity and flux, where right-wing gangs are on the rise, unsurprisingly so. 

All seems well until Pierre is told that his eldest son was spotted vandalizing a site in town together with a bunch of unruly youngsters, a piece of news that makes the dad’s blood curdle. From then on, justified paranoia settles in and Pierre’s vigilance can only match the proportions of his son’s resistance. In many ways, the father-son conflict in the film is one we’re fed up with: between misdirected care, restrictions, and acting out, the knots in their familial bond are made of patriarchal frustrations. 

While his younger brother is gearing up to study in Paris’s most prestigious university, Fus is doing his apprenticeship degree in metallurgy: a clear marker of his lack of academic gift. Instead of reading or studying, he stays out late, mingling with “the wrong crowd,” as every boomer parent would call it. At the core of Fus’s frustrations one can perhaps sense a deep loneliness and fear of abandonment—a mother who passed away, a father who works long shifts, and a younger brother to stay strong for—but The Quiet Son decisively steers away from his perspective. 

Instead, we stay with the father and his abstract (if well-founded) suspicions and pain. While these are important aspects that give the characters depth and relatability, they still remain too distant from the titular son’s actual troubles. Fus remains unknowable—even if that is a sought result, it is still frustrating—for both his father and the audience. In the attempt to evoke more empathy, the Coulin sisters have replicated the very pattern of passivity the Lindon’s character suffers from. 

Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s previous film, The Stopover, won the Un Certain Regard Best Screenplay Award in Cannes 2016, but their latest one fails to compel and offer new perspectives on a dead end situation. While The Quiet Son appeals to the countless anxieties both parents and children face in the rise of the far right sentiments, especially among young people, it neither answers or soothes them. For example, Lindon’s Pierre is very likable and tender at first, a single dad who has earned the respects of his two sons by guiding them through adolescence, and yet, his character seems painfully flat. One cannot help but look at The Quiet Son and quiver in longing for his expressive ambivalence and the way he portrayed a worried father in Julia Ducornau’s Titane. It’s obvious Lindon is the anchor of this film, but the banality of Pierre’s “my house, my rules” attitude ever-present in the script makes him look either completely disinterested or overprotective.

Given how predictable the film’s tragic outcome is, The Quiet Son is not really set for surprises. It begs the question what gap is it filling in order to be in competition for this year’s Golden Lion. A moderately political story that’s decently acted and very French, this one might have been better suited for VOD instead of the Venice line-up, where it stands as a symptom of the tendency of European festivals to oversaturate themselves my regurgitating themes that are of undeniable importance, but turning them into very unremarkable, forgettable films. Even those films that seem to take masculinity seriously. 

Grade: D+

This review is from the 2024 Venice Film Festival where The Quiet Son premiered in competition. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.