Our Children

Two arcs propel Joachim Lafosse’s remarkable Our Children. 

The most obvious and significant is the heroine Murielle’s decline from a beautiful, loving, young spirit to a depressed, oppressed, despairing drudge. She proves the dictum, Biology is destiny. From her honeymoon through her four child bearings she loses her sense of self, her liberty, her control over her life. Her last action is her tragic resolve to save her three daughters and one son from their being ruined by the sexist, patriarchal system that destroyed her. Unable to grant them liberty she gives them death. Though her Moroccan husband Mounir claims he doesn’t want to raise his daughters in his sexist homeland, Murielle is destroyed by a European patriarch in Belgium. 

Dr. Pinget provides the antithetic arc. His apparent generosity and care are gradually exposed as heartless self-serving power and authority. Having married a young Moroccan woman, he leaves her in her homeland but brings one of her brothers, then eventually the other, to Europe variously to serve him. When his hopes to have Mounir join his medical practice are dashed, he hires him for office work. He pays for Mounir and Murielle’s honeymoon, then agrees to join them. He shares his house with them, then to keep them buys them an estate where he again lives with them. His callousness towards Murielle drives her tragedy. 

The film’s primary theme is woman’s suffering in a male system. In a key scene Murielle sings along with a popular tune on the car radio. First the man sings that he loves all women, then that they are so complex, they are so difficult. His appreciation overlies rejection. As she realizes she has been living the role the patriarchy cast her in she breaks down crying. The male attraction to woman is fatal to her.

Dr Pinget appears to be sexless. His marriage seems a paper affair, like the one he arranges for Mounir’s brother and Murielle’s sister. He doesn’t have any relationships outside the family he has bought, Murielle’s. He walks out indignant when her sister asks if he has any love-life. As for Mounir, his insensitivity is latent as early as his marriage proposal. He doesn’t tell Murielle he loves her, or even ask her to marry him. He just states he wants to marry her. Perhaps an endearing shyness at that point, it turns into verbal and physical violence later, as he leaves Murielle to run the house and the family and is harshly critical when she has problems.

As we watch the daughters grow more beautiful and delightful, especially when they play at the make-up ritual that will turn them into women, they seemed doomed to blossom into their mother’s gloom. When she summons them one by one upstairs they leave behind a TV cartoon with a corpulent white authority figure, an image of Dr Pinget, exercising his rage.

Murielle finds understanding and sympathy in only two people. With one she only speaks, with the other she can’t. The first is the therapist whom Dr Pinget attacks her for seeing. The other is Mounir’s mother, with whom she shares an understanding of woman’s oppression but from whom she’s isolated by their different language. The victims’ shared understanding survives national borders. When the mother collapses from a vision of death, she may have sensed Murielle’s not her own. (That shadow crops up on the side of the screen in several shots, reducing the wide screen as it does Murielle’s living space.) But all she can advise Murielle is “Get rest.” She herself is a victim of the system, forced to be grateful to the doctor for buying and taking away both her sons and remotely controlling her daughter.  

The tension between the Moroccan family and the fat, hedonistic, impotent but suffocatingly powerful white European doctor adds another compelling theme. This domestic tragedy is also a parable for European colonialism. The white power insinuates itself into its colony, funds it, wins its trust and affection, imposes its own culture, but for all its pretense of generosity and care insists on dominating it and imposing its will. Any move to independence is suppressed as an affront to nature and to reason. (The film’s original French title is A Prendre la raison, or Insanity.) That ruthless power is what the male patriarchy shares with the European colonial tradition.

The film opens with a woman crying, begging that her four children be buried in Morocco. So it’s a whodunit. Except here the killer is the true victim. 

Not that this film needs any factual justification beyond its careful metaphors, but it was triggered by the 2007 case in Nivelles, Belgium, where Genevieve Lhermitte killed her five children.