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| Patrick Dewaere, Claire Maurier, Yves Robert Un Mauvais Fils |
Once again the Claude Sautet season at the Randwick Ritz presents a rarity. There have been few, if any screenings of this week’s film in Australian theatres and no known release on DVD.
For A Bad Son (Un Mauvais Fils) made in 1980 Sautet struck out into unfamiliar territory. The middle-class melodramas, featuring iconic French stars, were decisively put to one side. For a location he returned to the working-class milieu of his own childhood. For a lead actor he chose the temperamental but hugely talented new star Patrick Dewaere A key Sautet theme—the fraught relationships between adult children and their parents—comes to the fore in this heartbreaking family drama. In one of the great, nervous, end-of-his-tether performances that typified his tragically brief career, the extraordinary Patrick Dewaere, casting him as Bruno, a young man returning to Paris after serving a prison sentence. Now clean and determined to rebuild his life, Bruno takes up residence with his widower father and begins drifting through a series of menial jobs. and contact with the beautiful Catherine (Brigitte Fossey).
Dewaere’s flame burned bright but he took his own life barely two years later. His solitary film with Sautet remains as one of the performances of his career and a Sautet highlight. As Tom Charity said in the Time Out Film Guide: “Sautet’s patient softly-softly approach pays dividends and you end up caring about the apparently unprepossessing Bruno.”
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| Brigitte Fossey, Patrick Dewaere Un Mauvais Fils |
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