A family torn apart by terror tactics and fury
Directing child actors credibly is one of the hardest things to pull off. But the French writerdirector Xavier Legrand manages it so brilliantly in Custody, his electric and unpredictable feature debut, it makes his whole film quiver and convulse.
Thomas Gioria plays 11-year-old blond schoolboy, Julien, who’s caught up in the brutal divorce proceedings between his parents Miriam and Antoine (Léa Drucker and Denis Ménochet). During the long, tense opening scene, a custody hearing in which five adults in a small room are determining his future, a weary magistrate has to pick through the competing allegations and come up with the best compromise.
In the one corner is careful, tight-lipped Miriam, who has repeatedly escaped her husband’s clutches, by moving town and changing her phone number. Antoine, she says, has previously caused physical harm to her 18-year-old daughter (Mathilde Auneveux), whose boyfriend he disapproves of. He’s also been known to sleep in the car outside Miriam’s parents’ home, where she and the children have been sheltering.
Antoine says that his daughter hurt her wrist in the gym; that Miriam has poisoned both children against him; and that Julien, unlike his sister, is too young to be deprived of his father’s guidance. Every viewer is put in the same position as the judge – weighing up what benefit of the doubt the father deserves, with little concrete evidence of his actual wrongdoing. And then we get to know what sort of terror tactics he’s capable of.
Ménochet uses his intimidating physique and guttural voice to convey a potential for threat we’re wary about from the start. But he knows how to tamp it down, and he’s calculating, too, gleaning secret information from his son’s school notebooks and using it to win petty wars in the logistical squabbles each weekend brings. Every time Julien is brought back to his maternal grandparents, they receive him inside like a soldier returning from the Somme.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Legrand made his start playing an antisemitic classmate in Louis Malle’s Au Revoir les Enfants (1987), a film hard to beat for its acting from kids of roughly Gioria’s age. Whatever instinct or gift Malle transmitted on that set has been passed right down the line here.
In close-up, as Julien cowers against his dad’s van window, the verbal wounds and manipulative strategies take their toll, until he’s practically eaten alive with stress and despair. Tiny or trivial as they might seem on paper, these emotional assaults gain such conviction in performance that his ordeal feels like the social realist equivalent of enduring Dunkirk.
The war of attrition escalates alarmingly, making us question a lot of stray assumptions, and dragging us to places it’s hard to be fully prepared for. You don’t even want to be.
As a demonstration of slighted masculinity being given an inch, taking a mile, and chewing it up with breakneck fury, the film could hardly be more timely or disconcerting. But it also understands the ignition point of rage – not just its ugly momentum.