Your lover's son robs your dad's shop. Dad shoots him. Awkward family dinner incoming.
In the suburb of Lille, Stéphane holds a tobacco shop with his father, Maurice, a retired military officer. Although feeling trapped in his marriage, Stéphane doesn't want to leave his wife, Elise, a lawyer, and is currently having an affair with Leila, a physiotherapist and mother of two. Together they hope for a better life, but everything changes when Sofiane, Leila's 15 year old son, holds up the store at gunpoint, without any knowledge of his mother's affair with Stéphane. Maurice-violently hit-pulls out a gun and shoots him.
Acting
Guy Marchand's terrifying patriarchal collapse
Direction
Bertrand's claustrophobic suburban framing
Writing
The impossible knot of complicity and blame
Director
Renaud Bertrand
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Part of a wave of French 'banlieue' cinema examining class tension through intimate tragedy rather than urban riots.
The tobacco shop setting is deliberate—France's 'buralistes' are state-licensed, making Maurice's violence a betrayal of republican order itself.
FR
