‘The Successor’ Review: Cold, Controlled French Thriller Implicates Entire Patriarchy in the Sins of a Father
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In “The Successor” — a provocative psychological thriller with a lot more actual psychology than the genre typically offers — Paris-based fashion designer Ellias Barnès (Marc-André Grondin) stands on the precipice of a breakthrough in his career. He’s poised to take his place as creative director of the fashion house Orsino, following the death of its eponymous founder. If this were a tale of corporate ambition (à la “Succession”), or perhaps a Roman palace intrigue, here is the moment that Ellias would assume the throne. But instead of feeling victorious, he clutches his chest. The anxiety is almost too much. And then the police arrive.
It’s taken more than a decade, but Ellias has done everything he can to distance himself from his biological father. As such, there’s an ironic perversity to the news he gets right after his stunning solo show for Orsino: His dad, Jean-Jacques, is dead, and there’s no one else to handle his estate. No sooner has Ellias buried his creative father figure than he’s obliged to deal with the real one.
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Taking a leave of several days to return to Montreal (a place the Canada-born designer, né Sebastian, would prefer his peers didn’t associate with his self-made persona), Ellias discovers something terrible about his dad. The worst possible thing. And just like that, Jean-Jacques’ secret is Ellias’ problem to deal with. There’s no question how he should handle the situation, but it’s easy to understand why he might hesitate. Triggered by the shock, the chest pains return. He wets his pants.
To the audience’s horror, Ellias finds himself assuming the role his father played — for a time at least — in an unconscionable crime. Taken literally, “The Successor” is a chilling thing to watch. Step back and imagine what it’s saying on a metaphorical level, and it’s clear that writer-director Xavier Legrand has crafted one of the most damning depictions of patriarchal power imaginable. Whether the film is meant to be seen as an isolated case or a metaphor for a much larger societal problem, the impact is unnerving.
Legrand began his career as a young actor (appearing as an extra in Louis Malle’s “Au Revoir les Enfants”). Though he still acts, a decade ago he staged a dramatic reinvention as a filmmaker. With his Oscar-nominated short “Just Before Losing Everything” and award-winning feature “Custody,” both about a mother and child fighting to escape an abusive father, Legrand demonstrated an uncommon ability to capture the terrifying real-world stakes of domestic violence. The subject felt harrowingly real in Legrand’s hands, as he framed an escape from the position of the victims.
In “The Successor,” the morality is more ambiguous, and the character Legrand asks audiences to identify with far pricklier. For a short time, before the film’s sickening revelation, they might even assume Ellias was unfairly harsh in cutting off his father. That’s certainly the view that Jean-Jacques’ one and seemingly only friend, Dominique (Yves Jacques), implies when he stops by the modest suburban home to pay his respects. Ellias’ ambition has carried him far from his middle-class upbringings, and he’s visibly uncomfortable being back in Canada, confronted by these reminders of his roots.
That premise is universal enough, though the film’s meticulously staged, arm’s-length approach hardly gives Ellias the chance to grieve. He orders the “express option” at the funeral home and arranges for all of his father’s possessions to be donated to charity. And then comes the twist, which Legrand handles with care, shielding audiences from what could have been a cheap jump scare. Even so, they may spring in their seats, given their emotional investment in a character who’s brusque and unfriendly, yet deeply compelling all the same.
It’s a tricky role for Grondin, playing someone who’s shut down this part of his identity. One of the employees at the funeral home recognizes him from fashion school. He graciously accepts her flattery, but clearly doesn’t see her as an equal. Legrand calibrates his films in such a way that there’s a strong genre-movie engine to drive the plot (this one plays like Alfred Hitchcock by way of Ulrich Seidl), but the substance is contained in the subtext: the words that go unspoken between characters, or the actions too difficult to take, and what bungled decisions say about human weakness.
Why doesn’t Ellias immediately go to the authorities? Is he protecting his father’s legacy? Or is he more concerned about what this scandal might do to his career? “The Successor” is guaranteed to provoke debate, and one split-second act will likely alienate a segment of the audience for good. Seen from Ellias’ perspective, the benevolent-acting Dominique seems incredibly suspicious — at least, until the funeral service, when the full scope of the situation is revealed. Sitting in the back row, Ellias cries uncontrollably. But this isn’t the catharsis the other mourners take it to be.
There are countless ways Legrand could have made “The Successor” a more comfortable experience. By choosing to mire Ellias in his dad’s misdeeds, he takes the harder road and implicates audiences — if not in the sins of the father, then in the failings of the system at large.
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