Anatomy of a Fall’s Swann Arlaud plays a father who gets caught in a dangerous situation with his son in a well-made yet frustrating misfire
As writer-director, Vladimir de Fontenay has taken the central novella Sukkwan Island from David Vann’s autobiographical short-fiction collection from 2009, detached it from the surrounding complex constellation of stories related to this main piece and presents it here as a standalone drama of father-son bonding. The resulting film begins as something forthright and heartfelt; it looks as if it’s going to be a liberatingly scary wilderness adventure out there in the real world away from cellphones, social media etc. But with its strenuous yet subdued performances and weirdly cramped and gloomy narrative, it leads us finally into a blind alley: a twist-reveal which I found fundamentally unsatisfying.
Swann Arlaud (the lawyer from Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall) is Tom, a guy who is unhappily separated from Elizabeth (Tuppence Middleton) due to his own now bitterly regretted infidelity. Above all, he misses their now teenage son Roy – played by Woody Norman, the tousle-haired kid from Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon from 2021. He pleads with Elizabeth to let him take Roy away with him for a stay in a lakeside cabin he has rented on remote Sukkwan Island (in Alaska in the original, now in the Norwegian fjords) – he promises a glorious time of hunting, fishing and emotional reconnection.
My Father’s Island (aka Sukkwan Island) screened at the Sundance film festival and is in UK and Irish cinemas from 3 July.
Continue reading...
Anatomy of a Fall’s Swann Arlaud plays a father who gets caught in a dangerous situation with his son in a well-made yet frustrating misfireAs writer-director, Vladimir de Fontenay has taken the central novella Sukkwa...
See more
