Maddened By His Absence (Sandrine Bonnaire, 2012): France

Reviewed by Kimberly Howard.  Viewed at The Metropolitan 4, SBIFF 2013

Maddened By His Absence is a French film directed by Sandrine Bonnaire about the loss of a son with the focus seemingly to be on Jacques (William Hurt)and his inability to come to terms with the death of his son. His character is divorced from his wife, but he returns to see her and develops an instant friendship with her new son from her second husband. Hurt’s character is mainly silent, and he carries the weight of the grief in his eyes and there is a stagnant “puddle” of tears that remains in his eyes throughout the movie. His crippling inability to come to terms and forgive himself is the main visual to this movie and as a result, provides for a very slow pacing and,typical of French film, offers no resolved ending.

When ready to return home to the States, Jacques is in the basement of the family’s apartment and notices the box containing his deceased son’s belongings which prompts him to hide out in the basement. He is still not over the past of his son’s accident, yet in the present he is trying to make up for that by forming a friendship with his wife’s new son. From this point on, he is not considered in my opinion to be the central character, but his deceased son is the center of the wheel and each spoke represents the madness that slowly unravels from Jacques’s character. We see his ex-wife share his grief in a scene that marks closure for both of them acknowledging that their child is passed, yet when she learns her ex has locked himself in the basement, and her current son is the only one who knows, she herself becomes maddened.

Although the new son forms a friendship with Jacques and initially helps him hide in the basement, he begins to see the abnormalcy,and even points it out to him. He says only “people that are dead stay underground in cold, dark places.” That very profound statement catches for just a brief moment Jacque’s attention. But perhaps just enough to acknowledge the child’s wisdom, but not enough to elicit a turn for the better in Jacques.

There is a final person involved in the wheel of the son’s death which takes the movie to its final scene. After this lengthy drawn out scene occurs, without giving away the movie’s ending, the viewer will get a whole picture of the individual ways people deal with the death of a child. In whole, everyone becomes maddened, beginning with Jacques and spilling over onto
the cast. I think there are many ways this story could have been represented, but to say it was a poor quality movie due to the movie’s pacing and the stagnancy of Hurt’s character is to disregard even one person’s true life experience from the loss of a child. This movie can serve as an empathetic outlet and offers everyone to see what it is like to be “maddened by his absence.”