My Son, the French film with Guillaume Canet and Mélanie Laurent, opens in San Francisco and Berkeley

Cinema

My Son is the latest and 5th movie by the French director Christian Carion, featuring Guillaume Canet and Mélanie Laurent. My Son opens in San Francisco and Berkeley on May 17, 2019.

Christian Carion and Guillaume Canet are used to work together. My Son is aleady their 3rd collaboration after Joyeux Noël - that earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film - and Farewell.

In the middle of the night, a 7-year-old boy has gone missing. The crisis has drawn the child’s father Julien (Guillaume Canet) back to a small, snowy town in eastern France in an effort to help. Julien travels abroad for work and has been essentially absent from his son’s life since splitting with his wife (Mélanie Laurent) a few years earlier. Fueled by his sense of guilt about neglecting his family, Julien is determined to do whatever it takes to find his son. That includes using physical force against anyone he speculates could be a suspect in the kidnapping – and disobeying police instructions by stepping outside of the law, as he begins to unfold the mystery of the boy’s disappearance.

Here, in a remarkable filmmaking twist, Carion made the decision to keep Canet almost completely in the dark about the movie’s plot. The film was shot in sequence over a quick six days. Guillaume Canet, onscreen for virtually every minute, was experiencing events, struggling with his emotions, and discovering clues in real time, just as his character was. The result is a dynamic thriller with an added layer of authentic tension.

The trailer...