Arnaud Desplechin returns with a bold pivot from his usual abstract storytelling, delivering a scorching melodrama about a fractured family. The film follows Louis and Alice, siblings whose bond has soured into a dangerous, mutual hatred. In the opening moments, the audience discovers the death of Louis’s six-year-old son, an event that instantly tugs the thread of their shared history. Five years onward, a car crash caps a cascade of calamities, leaving their mother in a coma and their father fighting for life. In under five minutes, the family unit is already on the brink of collapse, and the long-simmering rift between Louis and Alice erupts into the foreground of the narrative.
Louis, a renowned theatre actor, walks through a life shaped by public acclaim and private bitterness. His past as a teacher and writer is revealed through the novels that exposed Alice to humiliations he crafted with cruel precision. Desplechin does not shy away from that truth—Family Matters becomes a stark examination of how history colors present conflicts. The drama invites the audience to witness two protagonists descend together, yet the viewer cannot escape the pull of their shared memories and the ache of past betrayals. It is a story where culpability and empathy collide, leaving both siblings exposed to the judgment of their own consciences.
The film sits firmly in a distinctly French register, where heightened emotion, intimate psychology, and social nuance intersect. The melodrama is infused with a bold, almost operatic sensibility, punctuated by moments of raw honesty that feel uncomfortably intimate. Egos collide; guilt festers; and the tension between artistic ambition and personal loyalty becomes a guiding force. The world in which Louis and Alice move—one of bourgeois taste, public performance, and private longing—acts as both stage and mirror. Opium-like cravings for escape, whether literal or metaphorical, appear as fragments that illuminate a broader search for meaning in a life defined by public visibility and private turmoil.
Desplechin navigates a delicate line between sublimity and ridicule, a balance that has long characterized his work. The film uses spatial contrasts, crisp camera work, and a rhythm that shifts between sudden outbursts and quiet, almost devotional pauses. It is in these silences that the audience senses the weight of years, the fear of repetition, and the stubborn stubbornness that keeps the siblings tethered to one another even as they push away. The result is a drama that feels tactile and immediate, a portrait of a family that can’t quite escape the gravity of its own history while still insisting on speaking the truth in the moment.