The Son of Joseph

You could argue that the films of French direc­tor Eugèné Green are a vac­u­um of emo­tion. He instructs his actors to intone lines direct­ly to cam­era. The dia­logue is slow and man­nered, every syl­la­ble is round­ly enun­ci­at­ed. Char­ac­ters in his films don’t real­ly talk to one anoth­er, they com­mu­ni­cate in the way robots or com­put­ers might.

And yet, for all the effort he takes to expunge any­thing that might be described as real­ism, his films exert a strange nar­cot­ic grip. By scrap­ing back arti­fi­cial emo­tion, you’re left with some­thing very pure. His new film, The Son of Joseph, recounts the nativ­i­ty in mod­ern day Paris, refram­ing the immac­u­late con­cep­tion as a sin­gle moth­er whose part­ner left her because she chose not to abort their child.

Trou­bled school­boy Vin­cent (Vic­tor Ezen­fis) is that child, dis­cov­er­ing his true nature and vow­ing vengeance on his estranged, neglect­ful father, Oscar (Math­ieu Amal­ric). But, his plan takes a turn for the bizarre when he bumps into Oscar’s ami­able broth­er, Joseph (Fab­rizio Ron­gione), and the pair become fast friends. Hav­ing to stick to this fan­ci­ful con­ceit does damp­en some of the impul­sive, tran­scen­dent qual­i­ties seen in Green’s most exem­plary work such as 2004’s Le Pont des Arts and 2009’s The Por­tuguese Nun. Plus, the occa­sion­al cut-aways to paint­ings and music (a baroque church con­cert) feel like stock direc­to­r­i­al tics rather than neces­si­ties for this story.

But the film does man­age to catch you off guard, mix­ing absur­dism and sin­cer­i­ty, com­e­dy and tragedy, the real­is­tic and the sur­re­al, the mod­ern and the clas­si­cal and, final­ly, puls­ing emo­tion and brit­tle for­mal­ism. The Son of Joseph actu­al­ly makes for the per­fect entry point for brave trav­ellers look­ing to explore the won­der­ful world of this sin­gu­lar director.