Une enfance (2015)
Directed by Philippe Claudel

Film Review

With four full-length films to his name, novelist-turned-director Philippe Claudel has yet to live up to the promise of his debut feature Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (2008).  After the star-studded Avant l'hiver (2013), Claudel appears to be slumming it in his latest feature Une enfance, a scrappy portrait of early adolescence at the lower end of the social spectrum that is late in clambering aboard the bandwagon set in motion by the Dardenne brothers with their 2011 hit Le Gamin au vélo.  Claudel's belated foray into social realism suffers by comparison with the spate of similar films following on from the Dardennes' kid-with-a-bike crowdpleaser, notably Edward Berger's Jack (2014) and Emmanuelle Bercot's La Tête haute (2015), both of which deal with the subject matter in a far more authentic and involving manner.

The fact that Claudel chose to situate his film in the small industrial town where he grew up - Dombasle in the suburbs of Nancy - lends it a personal touch, but the writer-director seems visibly disconnected from the subject of his film.  Instead of a sincere portrait of a child coping with the brutality of life on the margins - in the manner of Ken Loach's Kes (1969) - what Claudel serves up feels more like a recycled mass of clichés, and rather than engage with his socially inferior characters, he seems to look down on them with disdain, as if they were vermin wallowing in their own filth.  The grown-up characters are pure archetypes - the alcoholic mother who totally ignores her children, her layabout druggie boyfriend, the sympathetic schoolteacher...  Oddly, the only adult character who rings true is a tennis coach played by Claudel himself.  Almost the entire weight of the film falls on its lead actor Alexi Mathieu, who copes admirably in his first screen role as the tenacious and well-rounded thirteen-year-old Jimmy, with whom we develop an ambivalent rather than sympathetic interest.

In spite of a script that feels like a hastily cobbled together cut-and-paste job, as lacking in structure as it is in originality, Mathieu's charismatic presence somehow holds Une enfance together and gives it an emotional resonance which it barely deserves.  There's hardly a scene in the film that does not come across as second-hand and laboured - it's as stereotypical a view of life at the bottom of the social heap as you can imagine.  It is hard to take seriously Claudel's proclaimed intention of making this a first in a series of films following Jimmy's journey to maturity, in a similar vein to François Truffaut's Antoine Doinel cycle.

Claudel's own 400 coups is borderline pedestrian, peddling out-dated notions of social determinism instead of coming to grips with the underlying social issues, half-heartedly toying with our emotions without bothering to develop real characters and giving us a genuine sense of what life is like for people in their predicament.  Flawed as it is, Une enfance still has its charms and in one or two scenes its grotesquely simulated concern does seem to turn into the real thing, but for the most part it is too heavy-handed and artificial to have much of an impact.  You are almost ready to forgive the film its shortcomings when Claudel bolts on a final plot twist that makes you want to howl with disappointment.

Film Synopsis

In a small industrial town in the east of France, 13-year-old Jimmy has already put his childhood behind him as he takes charge of his impoverished household.  Neglected by his alcoholic mother and constantly abused by her lazy, drug-addicted boyfriend Duke, it falls upon him to look after his younger brother Kevin and ensure that all the household chores get done.  Meanwhile, he struggles at school and is already two years behind.  Jimmy's future is far from promising...