Father & Soldier

Tirailleurs

Cannes Film Festival

VERDICT: Mathieu Vadepied’s affecting portrait of paternal love hinges on intensely involving performances by Omar Sy and Alassane Diong, as an African father who goes to war to protect his conscript son.

The story of foreign fighters conscripted into European wars has been greatly undertold, one memorable attempt being Days of Glory (Indigènes) from Rachid Bouchareb about North African soldiers fighting with the Free French Forces in the Second World War, another Vijay Singh’s moving documentary Farewell My Indian Soldier (2016). Opening Cannes’ Un Certain Regard on a high note, the French-Senegalese coproduction Father & Son (Tirailleurs) by French director Mathieu Vadepied is a bolt of truth about the harsh reality of how young African men were hunted down and rounded up by the French army and forced to “defend the motherland” on the killing fields of Europe during World War I.

This dark-hued portrait of war’s horrors, shot against burnt fields and barbed wire, evokes a feeling of remarkable realism behind its thin storyline. The film’s documentary value is valorized in the striking simplicity of Vadepied’s storytelling, which reads like a fable (admittedly improbable, as most fables are) about a Senegalese herdsman whose love for his son is so great he follows him to war. French actor Omar Sy (who became immensely popular and the first Black man to win France’s best actor César for Les Intouchables, followed by a Hollywood career with roles in X-Men: Days of Future Past and Jurassic World) creates an unforgettable father whose attachment to his family gives him a clear vision of how the African fighters are being exploited.

The film begins in Verdun in 1920, where a brief, macabre scene is heightened by Alexandre Desplat’s anxious score pregnant with misgiving, all offering the viewer a strong clue that not all the characters will survive the dramatic events that are about to be told. Two soldiers in faded blue uniforms dig the loose earth and uncover bones, which they pray over and put in a plain wooden crate. This scene will return in the closing minutes of the film with added significance.

The story proper begins in the blinding white light of the African savannah, where Bakary (Sy) and Thierno (Alassane Diong) are grazing a respectable herd of cattle. Thierno, who could be in his late teens, has the same silent gravity on his face as his father, who he obeys respectfully, trustingly and without question. There are no long scenes, just flashes on their work with the animals, and we observe how Thierno learns from Dad’s patient instruction about how to treat a thorn in the hoof. Their home, where the boy’s mother and sisters await their return, is just as loving, recalling the opening scenes in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu. But here, it’s not the Jihadists who arrive to spoil the beauty of human life in a natural world, it’s the French army. In one of cinematographer Luis Armando Arteaga’s most terrifying shots, they appear in the dusty distance on horseback and ride down Bakary and Thierno as they flee across the desert.

On closer inspection, all the soldiers are Africans – though the enlistment officers are French and white. They only want young men as cannon fodder, but Bakary can’t bear to let his son go to the slaughter alone and enrolls with him. The officer doesn’t bat an eye when he claims to be 30, and congratulates him for his ardor to fight for the “mamaland”.

In the blink of an eye, without any transfer scenes, the action shifts to a small rainy hamlet in the French countryside, where an entire military command of soldiers is billeted – all Africans except for the dashing 30-year-old officer who leads them, Lt. Chabreau. Playing the lieutenant, Belgian actor Jonas Bloquet walks a narrow line between white privilege and camaraderie/friendship with the young Africans in his charge, all of which is pleasantly unexpected, but also feels ahistorical. Vadepied and his co-screenwriter Olivier Damangel make him a wee bit more plausible by giving him a ferocious inferiority complex towards his father, who turns out to be an important man, indeed.

Bakary and Thierno are frightened but keep an eye out for each other, even while they pretend not to be related. Here, too, sets are kept to a minimum and scenes are short and to the point. It doesn’t take much to evoke trench warfare and its aftermath of dead bodies on a donkey cart, and the spareness of the sets keeps the focus on the father’s dilemma: how to escape from a war thousands of miles from home? Though Bakary is warned that deserters are shot or hanged, he never wavers. Sy treats him as a true hero in his mission to save his son against impossible odds, but broadens the character in moments of unpredictable reactions and wit and anger.

The greatest obstacle to their escape turns out to be Thierno himself, who goes through a fast transformation on the battlefield from boy to man. He dares to quietly challenge his father’s authority to decide for his child: “Do children kill people?” Diong’s mesmerizing low-key performance perfectly illustrates the quandary of becoming an autonomous adult, combined with mixed loyalties and even nascent sentiments of patriotism which his father will never have.

The film is so focused and edited so concisely, it is a pleasure to watch. Yet sometimes one feels a lack of emotional release despite the inherent tragedy all around, and wonders why. The death of a young recruit, the melancholy lieutenant’s mad plans, the growing rift between father and son touch the head more than the heart, with only the final summing-up in Paris a sure-fire choker.

Director: Mathieu Vadepied
Screenplay: Olivier Damangel, Mathieu Vadepied
Cast: Omar Sy, Jonas Bloquet, Alassane Diong, Bamar Kane, Oumar Sey
Producers: Bruno Nahon, Omar Sy
Cinematography: Luis Armando Arteaga

Editing: Xavier Sirven
Costume design: Pierre-Jean Larroque
Music: Alexandre Desplat
Sound: Pierre Bariaud
Production companies: Gaumont Television, Korokoro, Unité
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
109 minutes