Free-range parenting in Aussie idyll
Outstanding child performances save The Boys Are Back, says Andrew M Brown

22 January 2010

The Boys Are Back
12A cert, 103 mins

A Prophet
18 cert, 149 mins

The Boys Are Back is a picturesque tear-jerker set in sun-dappled Australian wine country, adapted by Allan Cubitt from a memoir by Simon Carr, and directed by Scott Hicks, who made Shine. In the opening scene English sports journalist Joe Warr (Clive Owen), the character based on Carr is driving his Discovery quickly along an unending beach with his young son riding on the bonnet. We're invited to approve of Joe's recklessness but, of course, it's no wonder the Aussie bathers he passes shout at him to stop. What they don't understand is that doing thrilling things in cars with his sons is at the heart of Joe's childcare system - "free-range", as Carr describes it in his book. Joe's wife Katy (Laura Fraser) has died of cancer, leaving him with their son Artie (Nicholas McAnulty), six, to look after by himself.

Soon Joe's other son by his previous marriage, Harry (George MacKay), joins them - he lives with his mother and goes to boarding school in England, but flies out to stay with his father and half-brother for the summer. The massive strength of this film is in the two boys' performances - they're outstandingly real and intuitive.

The final stages of Katy's illness make for heart-wrenching viewing. But what saves the film from the merely maudlin is the toughness on little Artie's face and his wide, staring eyes when he says: "I want to die, so I can be with mummy." After Katy has died, Joe whisks Artie off for a spontaneous road trip, to the horror of his mother-in-law. These scenes, in the car and in motels, ring true about how hard it can be for fathers to communicate with angry sons and how children know exactly how to hurt their parents. Joe is prone to exaggerated pique no less than Artie.

The Boys Are Back is about two kinds of loss: the pain of bereavement, and also the abandonment felt by Joe's older son Harry as a result of his father leaving to marry his second wife. Joe has no answer for Harry when he asks: "Why did you leave me... didn't you miss me?" Joe has never thought of it like that.

The film makes much of his free-wheeling regime. On the fridge, letters spell out "Just Say Yes"; this is the guiding principle. The rules come down to those fundamentals of middle-class English life: good manners. "No interrupting adults" and "no swearing" because it's "a sign of laziness and egotism", and that's about it. From time to time Joe visits his newspaper office but mostly the three of them spend a fun summer together in a farmhouse that's a pastoral idyll, perfect for children, complete with kangaroos, a tree house and a zip wire.

Joe's system doesn't always work. He leaves Harry in charge overnight and it all goes disastrously wrong, proving the boys haven't actually learnt to survive on their own. In truth, Joe's children only appear feral and chaotic; they'll be fine in the end because, deep down, they have the DNA of their well-ordered middle-class parents.

***

The charismatic anti-hero of Jacques Audiard's sensational new thriller, A Prophet, is Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), a French-Arabic 19-year-old. We first meet him undergoing the brutalising indignity of a strip search at the start of a six-year stretch in a high-security prison. Malik cannot read or write and was brought up without parents in a juvenile centre. He has a sensitive, innocent face and looks perplexed to find himself in jail. However, in the corrupt prison system he emerges as a complex, highly driven individual who is prepared to use shocking violence to ensure his survival.

The prison population is divided along racial and religious lines. Corsican gangsters led by Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup) control the inmates through bribes to staff and the threat of violence. The Muslims stay in their own wing and keep to themselves in the exercise yard.

Since neither the Corsicans nor the real "Arabs" consider Malik one of theirs, he has no protector, until Luciani forces him to commit a horrific murder and this act binds Malik to the crime boss in a sort of fealty. Arestrup (from Audiard's earlier work The Beat That My Heart Skipped) is superb as Luciani _- ageing, with thinning hair, fat and slow-moving. It looks like a father/son relationship, except it's one where the master's dominance is total, affection is entirely absent and has been replaced by cruelty.

The movie shows Malik's transformation and his struggle to pursue his own interests independently of Luciani and to discover his identity. It is a fine performance by Rahim and A Prophet is an extraordinary film. Its depiction of the interior of a prison is as stark and detailed as a documentary, the prisoners have proper toe-rag faces, and the music by Alexandre Desplat is haunting. Altogether it's so powerful that, watching it, one feels a sense of physical danger.