Florian Zeller will continue to scale the family… | Little White Lies

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Flo­ri­an Zeller will con­tin­ue to scale the fam­i­ly tree with The Son

16 Mar 2021

Words by Charles Bramesco

Two elderly men in casual clothing, one with grey hair and a beard, the other with glasses, engaged in a lively conversation and gesturing.
Two elderly men in casual clothing, one with grey hair and a beard, the other with glasses, engaged in a lively conversation and gesturing.
The writer/​director of The Father is set to adapt his own play for his next fea­ture film.

It’s been a good week for writer/​director Flo­ri­an Zeller, the stage vet­er­an who adapt­ed his own play The Father for his first screen fea­ture. Yes­ter­day, the dra­ma racked up six nom­i­na­tions at the upcom­ing Acad­e­my Awards, includ­ing Best Pic­ture, and now Zeller has spun that trac­tion into the announce­ment of anoth­er project very much in the same vein.

His next film will fur­ther scale the fam­i­ly tree, as he’ll adapt his own play The Son in a con­tin­u­a­tion of the Imme­di­ate Rel­a­tives Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse. Dead­line also broke the news that Zeller has tal­ent in mind for the title role, though he won’t spec­i­fy whom just yet.

Over the 2010s, the French play­wright Zeller com­plet­ed a tril­o­gy of the­atre works encom­pass­ing The Father, The Son, and The Moth­er. (In 2019, Isabelle Hup­pert starred in the lat­ter.) While his recent­ly released film fol­lowed an aging man’s descent into demen­tia, The Son focus­es on an ado­les­cent boy torn between his divorc­ing moth­er and father as they start to build lives sep­a­rate from one another.

All the same, the two works will share themes of strain in inti­mate rela­tions, as we strug­gle to help our loved ones in the ways they need and vice ver­sa. It’s easy to see why top-flight actors like Antho­ny Hop­kins and Olivia Col­man have flocked to his film work; he gives his casts a lot of meat to gnaw on, cre­at­ing human-scaled nar­ra­tives dri­ven by char­ac­ter and dialogue.

But who will assay the school-aged pro­tag­o­nist lead­ing the final piece of Zeller’s stage trip­tych remains to be seen. Based sole­ly on the image on the cov­er of the for-sale script, I’m going to say Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met?

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