By Jay Weissberg

Of course a filmmaker of Andre Techine’s standing doesn’t simply “toss off” a feature, but it remains dispiriting that a director who can make emotionally trenchant movies – including the recent success “Being 17” – is also able to turn out duds like “Farewell to the Night”. Though “based on an original idea,” there’s very little originality in this story of a woman (Catherine Deneuve) discovering her grandson has been radicalized by Islamist extremists. As one of the more inclusive Western directors when it comes to Arab talent, Techine aims for a bit of character balance, but in the end, the film stumbles into the usual banal pitfalls and features some truly lamentable scenes. Muriel (Deneuve) is an independent woman in the French Basque region with a large horse farm and cherry orchard. She’s excited that grandson Alex (Kacey Mottet Klein, “Being 17”) is coming back, and not particularly bothered that he dropped out of med school. Though perhaps not entirely thrilled he’s in a relationship with Lila (Oulaya Amamra, “Divines”), a nurse’s aide and ranch helper he’s known since childhood, Muriel wants to be nothing but supportive.

What she doesn’t know is that Lila has radicalized Alex, now a Muslim convert, or that the two are gathering money to join ISIS in Syria. “What will you do if I die?” he asks his fresh-faced, eager-eyed young girlfriend. “I’ll be proud of you,” comes the expected response. The script tries hard to make Lila a more threedimensional figure than is usually granted to such a character, and in part it works, thanks greatly to Amamra’s charisma. She’s warm and kind to the seniors in her care at a nursing home, so she’s not a monster, yet as a clumsy scene with other jihadists shows, she’s also not fully aware of what she’s getting into, which makes a late revelation that the cops have had their eyes on her for six months ring false.

About that clumsy scene: Techine awkwardly cuts back and forth between a celebratory secular luncheon Muriel attends, where a bouncy teen girl incongruously dances around, and a jihadi gathering with Lila, sporting a hijab for the first time, excitedly talking with a woman recently returned from Raqqa. Yes, we get the contrast, but does it have to be so over-the-top and poorly edited? Also, does Alex need to be so one-dimensional? With his character stuck on “earnest” mode, he’s depicted as an angry young man still processing his mother’s death and searching for a meaning to life. While the profile fits many Western jihadis, the script keeps him a cardboard cut-out, a simulacrum of radicalized white boys that makes him no more “like us” than Bilal (Stephane Bak), the couple’s Islamist mentor.

Farewell

When Muriel is alerted that Alex has forged her signature on a few checks, she examines his room and finds the farewell note he conveniently left next to his computer, stating his intentions. Not knowing what else to do, she lures him into the stables and padlocks the door, then calls Fouad (Kamel Labroudi), a former jihadist fighter who repentantly came back to France and turned himself over, hoping he can talk sense into her grandson.

Fouad is the best-drawn character here, even if he’s clearly designed to fill the role of the “good young Arab” rejecting ISIS after a brief flirtation. Otherwise, the film is a flat drama about a real issue, given the depth of a TV movie-of-the-week. Techine is attuned to how Arabs are generally treated in the media, so he includes Muriel’s foreman Youssef (Mohamed Djouhri), a moderate, assimilated Muslim angry at the way his religion has been hijacked by extremists, and several of the extremists themselves are seen as confused people who’ve latched onto a philosophy they don’t truly understand. Conceptually the biggest flaw is in the Alex character, crying out for more shading in order to make him come alive.

Deneuve’s role isn’t weighty enough to carry the picture, and the silly scene of her locking Alex into the stable does no one any favors. There are many visual pleasures to be had in “Farewell to the Night,” especially among the blossoming cherry trees and the contrast between sea and mountains around Perpignan, but they’re not enough to paper over the film’s significant narrative and construction flaws.

Tolerance and non-judgemental understanding may be the best way to try to save radicalised young Europeans who want to go and join militant Islamists in Middle Eastern conflicts, veteran French actress Catherine Deneuve said on Tuesday.

“Farewell to the Night”, which premiered on Tuesday at the Berlin Film Festival, tells the story of Muriel, played by Deneuve, and her attempt to stop her grandson from joining Islamic State in Syria.

“The character in the film is certainly an intelligent woman, but she is also very tolerant, she is somebody who doesn’t judge, who tries to understand,” Deneuve told a news conference.

Muriel’s quiet life on a horse-breeding farm in rural France is interrupted by a visit from her grandson Alex whom she raised after his mother’s death in an accident.

He has stopped by the farm to say goodbye to her before supposedly leaving to take up a job in Canada. During his short stay, Muriel finds out that her grandson has been converted to Islam through his girlfriend Lila.

Muriel, herself born in Algeria, accepts her grandson’s new religion and tries to understand him. But she later learns that Alex plans to leave for Syria to join Islamic State and she becomes torn between trying to dissuade him from going and having the authorities intervene.

“The whole point of the film for me was about how this down-to-earth woman... how all of a sudden, she can find her way to help her grandson when she realizes that he’s crossed over to the other side,” director Andre Techine said.

Techine said he wanted the audience to ask themselves what they would do if they found themselves in that situation.

Muriel turns for help to an ex-jihadist who returned to France after trying to live in Syria for a while.

The film portrays Alex as having little understanding of Islam or of the political situation in Syria. The internet is his primary source of information about his religion and, for him and Lila, life after death is the only one worth living.

Much of the characters’ dialogue in the film is drawn from interviews with de-radicalised jihadists, Techine said.

“These are actually their own words ... I wanted those words to be heard by the audience,” he said. (RTRS)