A small-town coming-of-age story blown up to rock-opera dimensions, And Their Children After Them puts a roaringly romantic widescreen frame around some well-worn dramatic themes, but never quite hits the epic emotional high notes it strains to reach. The biggest project yet from young French writer-director duo Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma, this marathon blue-collar saga is based on the prize-winning 2018 novel Leurs enfants après eux by Nicholas Mathieu. Focussed on four summers across six years, 1992 to 1998, it tracks the interwoven lives of a handful of characters in an impoverished town in Eastern France, a post-industrial wasteland where the rusting hulk of the former steelworks now dominates the skyline, a towering symbol of both economic and psychological depression.
The Boukhermas have Spielberg-sized ambitions – indeed, their most recent feature was The Year of the Shark (2022), a skewed comic homage to Jaws (1975). They cite Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) as a major influence on the grand scale and epic feel of And Their Children After Them, and it is no surprise that they are currently mulling an English-language project. This deluxe soap opera may well open doors to major Hollywood studio work, but as an exercise in engaging cinema, it mistakes bigness for greatness, its power blunted by stilted performances and coy narrative omissions. With Warner Brothers readying a French release in December, this Venice Film Festival competition contender is likely to play better domestically, where book and cast already have cultural traction, than in other territories.
And Their Children Before Them began as a passion project for actor-director Gilles Lellouche, who co-stars here as Patrick, the ex-steelworker whose violent, drunken, short-fuse temper terrorises his sensitive teenage son Anthony (Paul Kircher) and long-suffering wife Hélène (Ludivine Sagnier). Lellouche initially pitched the book to the Boukhermas with a view to them scripting a TV series, which he would then direct.
Over time, it became a feature film directed by the duo, as Lellouche turned his attention to his Cannes-screened period drama Beating Hearts (2024). The two projects have plenty of crossover, including backing from several of the same production companies. Both are musically rich literary adaptions set in peripheral towns in north-eastern France, touching on similar themes of class tension, doomed love and petty criminality.
The key protagonist here is floppy-haired working-class dreamer Anthony, who grows from gangly, spotty, socially awkward 14-year-old to confident 20-year-old across the film’s span. The opening 1992 section begins with his first tentative flirtation with Stephanie (Angélina Woreth), who comes from a richer family, the initial spark of a stop-start romance that fizzles in and out across the next six years. Invited by Stephanie to a house party in a wealthy part of town, Anthony secretly borrows his father’s beloved motorcycle, a minor Ferris Bueller-sized transgression that has unexpected major consequences.
At the party, a random clash between Anthony and Hacine (Sayyid El Alami), a teenage drug dealer of Moroccan heritage, whose father once worked alongside Patrick in the steelworks, escalates into a slow-burn vendetta. These small sparks ignite a devastating series of events: exile and violence, separation and divorce, delayed revenge and attempted murder. As the drama skips forward in two-year leaps, these tensions leave deep scars on both families, never quite resolving even after tragedy and bereavement strike.
The Boukhermas paint And Their Children After Them in very broad strokes, light on narrative nuance, political context or psychological insight. Some details are covered too scantily: Hacine’s shadowy role as a local drug kingpin, for example, fuels one major scene but is oddly never mentioned again. While the male characters are mostly two-dimensional, the women are barely allowed one, with Stephanie and Hélène seemingly here purely to serve the needy men in their lives. This screenplay would not pass the Bechdel Test or any similar gender-balance ratio.
Lellouche does at least give a full-blooded, steam-belching performance as Patrick, changing his physicality impressively across the four chapters. That said, the decision to downplay his character’s racist views and domestic violence outbursts feels like an over-cautious cop-out, diluting the original novel’s power as a gritty state-of-the-nation social-realist snapshot.
But if tinkering with the novel is inevitable, and arguably forgivable, the real fatal flaw here is Kircher’s slack-jawed performance as Anthony, which is mannered to the point of catatonic. Born into a famous acting dynasty, as the son of Irene Jacob and Jérôme Kircher, the 22-year-old rising star has earned some impressive plaudits in his short career to date, including two César nominations: for Christophe Honoré’s Winter Boy (2022) and Thomas Cailley’s Animal Kingdom (2023). Kircher worked with a choreographer on this film to give Anthony an authentically gawky, clumsy, adolescent body language. But he may have succeeded all to well, as his performance plays like an interminable teenage sulk, more dazed stoner than sensitive romantic, with scant evidence of any rough charm or inner sweetness. Over the film’s bloated runtime, it becomes increasingly hard to empathise with a central character so consumed by self-pity and so low on self-awareness.
As a visual experience, And Their Children After Them has an appealingly lush, sun-bronzed look. Cinematographer Augustin Barbaroux favours majestic vistas and dynamic set-pieces, including a gun-toting showdown outside an inner-city apartment block which is framed like a classic western shoot-out. Musically, Amaury Chabauty’s twinkly piano score is almost parodically French, overly twee and syrupy sweet.
Thankfully it is drowned out by a prominently deployed jukebox soundtrack of vintage 1980s and 1990s hits, mostly alternative rock. Set during Nirvana’s peak popularity, the novel’s opening section was actually titled Smells Like Teen Spirit. While the Boukhermas were unable to secure a Nirvana track, there are subtle references to Kurt Cobain scattered across the film, including a choral version of vintage American folk ballad Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, which he famously covered. But the strongest needle-drop moment here is Bruce Springsteen’s all-time classic small-town escapism anthem, Born to Run, which sweeps Anthony out towards adulthood on a roaring wave of chest-thumping, fist-pumping, second-hand glory.
Directors: Zoran Boukherma, Ludovic Boukherma
Screenwriters: Zoran Boukherma, Ludovic Boukherma, after the novel by Nicolas Mathieu
Cast: Paul Kircher, Angélina Woreth, Sayyid El Alami, Gilles Lellouche, Ludivine Sagnier, Louis Memmi
Cinematographer: Augustin Barbaroux
Editor: Géraldine Mangenot
Production Designer: Jérémie Duchier
Music: Amaury Chabauty
Producers: Alain Attal, Hugo Sélignac
Production companies: Trésor Films, Chi-Fou-Mi Productions
World sales: Charades
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In French
144 minutes
