It’s a big ask of an audience to watch a film which for most of its two hour running time, focuses just two actors, even when they are doing their best work. It’s impossible to fault Woody Norman, the young British actor who first attracted praise on C’mon C’mon. Here he is playing 13-year-old Roy, a sensitive London schoolboy with a mop of unruly dark curls and expressive dark eyes. His parents’ relationship is long over when he takes up his estranged French father’s invitation to live for a year on an uninhabited island in the Norwegian fjords.
There’s nothing like catching fish, chopping down trees and fending off marauding bears to help a father and son bond. But while Swann Arlaud (the fiery lawyer in Anataomy of a Fall) can certainly hold the screen as Tom, a psychologically troubled father, he’s not quite convincing physically as an outdoorsman on a mission to instil Roy with manly skills. Arlaud (pictured below) is just a touch too urbane and handsome for the role, at least until things begin to fall apart.
My Father’s Island has been released in other territories as Sukkwan Island a title familiar to the many admirers of David Vann’s 2008 collection of short stories, Legend of a Suicide where it’s given to the central novella. A work of immersive and effective autofiction, Vann tackles the formative event of his childhood, his own father’s suicide. It’s easy to see why Vann’s novella appealed to the French-born, American-trained writer-director Vladimir de Fontenay, who made his debut with Mobile Homes, another troubled parent-child drama.
The cinematography is impressive; de Fontenay makes excellent use of the changing seasons to capture both the allure of the island’s isolation and its threat. But the film doesn’t quite know if it’s a hallucinatory story of a survivalist dad living out his dream at the expense of his family (see Mosquito Coast, Captain Fantastic) or a more meditative tale about an an adult looking back on childhood trauma to make sense of their fragmented memories (see The Blue Heron) .
My Father’s Island has two endings, the first deeply distressing to any parent, the second a cop-out designed presumably to ensure the audience doesn’t stagger out of the cinema in total despair. But I look forward to seeing how Woody Norman develops as an actor, and hope that de Fontenay gets to make another film, perhaps with an additional screenwriter to give his work more range.
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