JUSQU’A LA GARDE. To the hilt. That is the English translation of the original title of the film CUSTODY.
CUSTODY is built on fear and tension, the fear and tension inspired by a man prepared to do anything to get back together with a woman who wants to leave him to escape his violent behaviour.
The character of Antoine, played with seething malevolence by Denis Ménochet, is a permanent threat for those around him. He makes everyone around him tense; his selfishness is so centred he can only feel his own pain, and he strives to manipulate anyone, including his children and his parents.
Antoine is a bully and a cad, a cowardly custard who equates possession with love. Even though he and Miriam are divorced, he harbours reconciliation, an infantile fantasy fuelled by delusions of male dominance.
Women who have suffered domestic violence, like Miriam, played with fearful conviction by Léa Drucker, are always on high alert. She knows that danger can surface anywhere, any time, and no one is safe. Especially the children.
In one searing scene, Antoine interrogates his son, who responds in soundless, abject terror. Here is a father, supposedly a protector of his prodigy, terrorising a young boy, and adult of power and authority tormenting someone physically smaller – truly the hallmark of a bully.
Worldwide, a woman dies all too frequently as a result of domestic violence. Children too. If they survive, they are traumatised, and although the media talk about it, the topic remains largely taboo. Victims are afraid to come forward, neighbours and family don’t say anything, because they don’t want to interfere with the couple’s relationship. The judicial system also treads on tenterhooks. There is complicity and complacency conspiring to perpetuate a vicious cycle.
CUSTODY takes the audience into custody, and puts us right into the environs of domestic violence, the prison it becomes for the abused spouse and spawn in the kind of vicarious cinema which involves the spectator by playing with their intelligence and nerves.
Writer director Xavier Legrand certainly plays on the audiences nerves, notching up the tension with a slow burn fuse to the powder keg denouement.
CUSTODY is a hard watch with its emphasis on empathy rather than entertainment.
Legrand has made a powerful film that tackles a terror that stalks our so called civil society, with a cast that plays it to the hilt.
Bully for him.