And Their Children After Them: Film Review

And Their Children After Them (Leurs Enfants Après Eux) contains great bits of vibes-based needle-drops but lacks re-creating the same impact as the book.

Integration failure over many decades led to civil unrest and a persistent us versus them mentality. Like the generational routine of listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers and Aerosmith, integration is a matter that touches one’s entire lineage.

And Their Children After Them (Leurs Enfants Après Eux), the fourth film by twin brothers Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma, adapted from Nicolas Mathieu’s Prix Goncourt-winning book of the same name, begins in the early nineteen-nineties in a small French town near the Luxembourg border that recently transitioned to a post-industrial economy. Although it primarily focuses on the teenage children growing up in this working-class town, it quickly shifts to showing us how their parents experienced similar youthful hopes and dreams before reality hit; but that reality is much different depending on where one’s parents came from. It was no coincidence that Mathieu’s book was released a year after the 2017 French presidential election, and the film was released just two years after the 2022 election, both heavily influenced by these same issues of class and race.

The main protagonist of And Their Children After Them is fourteen-year-old Anthony (Paul Kircher, The Animal Kingdom), but perspective shifts occasionally reveal the inner lives of his love interest Steph (Angelina Woreth in her biggest role yet), his “rival” Hacine (Sayyid El Alami, Block Pass from Cannes this year), his father Patrick (Gilles Lellouche, Little White Lies), and his mother Hélène (Ludivine Sagnier, Swimming Pool and Un secret).

The plot takes place in quarters, each sequentially corresponding to an even year of the nineteen-nineties. Going against French film tradition, it takes place instead in the land-locked North-East of Paris, or some coast, in a small town with residents living between, as Mathieu writes in the book, the lower-middle class and the hard-core poor. Steph and her family are on the better-off end, Anthony’s somewhere in the fluctuating and anxious middle, and Hacine’s somewhat externally, racially imposed hard-core position. But one characteristic that they all face, throughout generation, class, and race, is the absolute boredom of a small community in decline, where the most fun one can have is getting a six-pack or taking a canoe for a joy ride.

The story begins with Anthony following his slightly older cousin from one beach to another, looking, if by chance, for a girl to notice them. The first that does, even at just one percent of total attention, is sixteen-year-old Steph. Whereas Anthony hasn’t thought much about his post-school existence, Steph hopes for Paris at 18, but that’s more because of cliché rather than any specific career aim. From their first lakeside interaction to their second at a fateful party, Steph keeps several arms-length distances from the formidably horny, pimple-faced Anthony (who will ditch those for acne scars in two years).

This fateful party is the important focal point in the first act in which all moments follow. It’s where Anthony and his cousin were invited by Steph, which creates that intangible connection that he’d been waiting to find in his adolescence. And it’s where Hacine shows up, uninvited, loudly announced, then bounced for more ambiguous ethnic and past disturbances reasons. Out of equal parts being a recently adrenalized teen trying to impress his infatuation and the film’s one moment of overt racism, Anthony trips Hacine and unintentionally creates a rivalry between the lower-middle class and hard-core poor, between French-born and French-but-maybe-Moroccan-born.

The real tragedy that Mathieu picks up and elaborates on in the book is the tragic multi-generational aspect that life continues, as is, from fathers to sons and mothers to daughters. Anthony and Hacine’s dads used to work together at the steel mill before it closed, and by all accounts are still friendly. One short post-industrial era later and their sons are escalating petty teen-age feuds into the kind of hostilities that the French upper-class and nationalists love: lower-middle class versus hard-core poor, distractions from real problems galore. First a simple foot-trip, then a stolen bike, then multiple parental confrontations, and the first act, and first plot period in time (1992), closes in a fiery blaze.

Along with that lapse in time and emotional states, the music plays the largest role in the film, sometimes overstepping its grounds but never not entertaining. To place the film in time and place, metal and rock hits from Iron Maiden to Metallica come crashing in between time jumps or moments where Anthony experiences some kind of youthful jouissance. But then, as if by cinematic magic, the film’s score kicks in, which is extremely reminiscent of Jonny Greenwood’s Licorice Pizza and also re-purposes Shame’s main theme (via The Thin Red Line). Sometimes the film relies too much on its needle-drops, though, which creates thunderous moments of head-banging (as much as one could do in a theater) but does the heavy lifting one too many times.

And Their Children After Them is noticeably less about generations in terms of race and class – a fixation of the book – and more about generations themselves: what were they listening to, what tech were they using, what were their aspirations in a dead-end town? It’s difficult not to focus on the music and media aesthetics in an audio-visual medium, which re-focuses much of the red hot political content into vibes-based fun and violence. But did does that work for this two and a half hour (that maybe should’ve been longer) coming-of-age movie?

As Zoran Boukherma stated to Deadline in an interview at the Venice Film Festival ahead of the film’s premiere, he and his brother wanted to create a film with bigger emotions like an American film but anchored in the peripherals of France. After all, French cinema is no stranger to youthful cinema (The 400 Blows, Goodbye First Love, Blue Is The Warmest Color), but, inspired by Jeff Nichols’ Mud, they chose to make the story more universal. The problem is: brothers Boukherma failed to transfer the overarching thesis of generational class and race to the film, which instead relies too much on conventional French coming-of-age tropes. One too many instances of gossiping, dramatic squabbles, will they won’t they, and not enough about how the parents’ disappointments and failures will inevitably rub-off on their offsprings, whether they like it or not.

The biggest losers are Hacine and Steph, who become functionaries of Anthony’s arc more than their literary counterparts. For instance, Hacine’s story ultimately is one about the failure of integration between North Africa and France, but that takes a massive cut.

To return to the question before, does this film work? Not as an adaptation, and not as a wholly coherent piece, but it does as a stylized, vibes-based work closer to a very long music video than epic multi-generational film. It works as a bridge between something with bigger emotions like an American film and a French film about its peripheries, even if what they still achieved in the end was a complimentary coming-of-age story.

And Their Children After Them (Leurs Enfants Après Eux) had its World Premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival where Paul Kircher won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor. The film will be screened at TIFF on September 7, 2024.