Summary
When his girlfriend walks out on him, André takes his 14 year old daughter, Véronique,
on a luxury holiday in Mauritius. Despite her father’s best efforts to keep
his daughter away from unsavoury looking young men, Véronique strikes up a friendship
with an attractive young surfer, Benjamin. To impress her new boyfriend, Véronique
concocts an increasingly far-fetched story about her father. When he finds out,
André agrees to back up his daughter’s story, but with some embellishments of his
own...
Review
Mon père ce héros is a fine example of French romantic comedy, with
an exceptionally well-balanced blend of humour and sentiment. The comedy seems to
fly off the pages of a very well written script, whilst not greatly diminishing the impact
of the tender entwined love stories that lie at the heart of the film.
The developing, tentative romance between Véronique and her first boyfriend, Benjamin,
is set aside the warm, but nonetheless volatile, father-daughter relationship of Véronique
and André. There is something quite poignant when André first realises
that he is losing his daughter to another man - although it doesn’t quite hit home until
he is finally separated from her. A combination of fine acting and a good script,
with some sumptuous location filming, work together to give an impression of credibility
and manage to trigger just the right emotional responses.
Gérard Depardieu and Marie Gillain are a formidable duo as the father-daughter
team, André and Véronique. Now in early middle-age, and somewhat overweight,
Depardieu is surprisingly entertaining, managing to achieve the right mix of comedy and
drama without going overboard in either direction. Some of his scenes with Marie
Gillain are so touching that you could easily think they were father and daughter in real
life.
The film does skid dangerously close to sentimentality on a few occasions, but mercifully
manages to pull back at the last moment. The same cannot be said of the lack-lustre
1994 American remake, however.
© James Travers 2000
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