The Childhood of a Leader
Brady Corbet (2015)
Brady Corbet’s first feature takes its title and basic theme from Jean-Paul Sartre’s (longish) short story. Sartre gets right inside the head of his young protagonist, describing Lucien Fleurier’s attempts to make sense of existence and struggle to affect the world he inhabits. As a pre-adolescent child, Lucien is more comfortable with plants and insects – he can destroy and squeeze out their inner fluids – than with relatively implacable entities such as trees, furniture and people. As a teenager, he ventures into Freud and into homosexual as well as heterosexual relationships but he gradually adjusts to the conventions of bourgeois family life that he once found alienating. He takes increasing pride in the mores of his class and, by the end of the story, is a confirmed patriot and a fully-fledged fascist thug: having joined Action française, it’s Lucien who administers the final blows when he and his cronies beat a Jewish man to death in the street. Sartre derives a few drops of sarcastic consolation from the fact that Lucien, even though he believes he’s now ready to be ‘a leader among Frenchmen’, still isn’t free of the underlying lack of self-confidence which, in earlier years, caused him to doubt even his own existence. In the final paragraph, Lucien looks at himself in a shop mirror:
‘But the mirror only reflected a pretty, headstrong little face that was not yet terrible enough. “I’ll grow a moustache,” he decided.’
The story isn’t the only material on which Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold, with whom he wrote the screenplay for The Childhood of a Leader, have drawn; John Fowles’ The Magus and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism are among other sources acknowledged. Corbet is free, of course, to adapt Sartre et al as he sees fit; but there are unfortunately clear signs from the very beginning of the film of a strong-arming, high-energy but superficial approach. The opening is headed ‘Overture’ and dominated by Scott Walker’s The Rite of Spring-inspired music. To put it another way: the Psycho score and the Jaws score seem to be colliding – and experiencing an immediate nervous breakdown as a result. The dark, louring tone of Lol Crawley’s cinematography and the camera’s hurtling movement towards the entrance of a large, forbidding house emphatically promise a horror story within. Even the fancy arrangement and illegibly rapid movement of the credits on the screen are a form of showing off.
The house, on the outskirts of Paris, is the location for negotiations that will lead to the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. An American diplomat (Liam Cunningham), his French wife (Bérénice Bejo) and their young son (Tom Sweet) are staying in the house while the negotiations take place. (The parents remain nameless throughout the film – so does the boy until near the end.) In the game room, the diplomat trades billiards shots and aphorisms about warfare with a journalist called Charles Marker (Robert Pattinson). The child is already indulging in violent strife of his own: cast as an angel in a nativity play at the local church, he disgraces himself, after the show is over, by throwing stones at the congregation. Sartre’s Lucien Fleurier has a strong appetite for being the centre of attention and, in his early years, feels continually thwarted by other people in his attempts to satisfy this appetite. The protagonist of Corbet’s movie has no such difficulty. He is such a conspicuous and disruptive influence that he can’t fail to be noticed, even in a house where political discussions of international importance and complexity are taking place: indeed, the three main ‘chapter’ headings of the story are ‘The First/Second/Third Tantrum’. Like Lucien, the long-haired child of the movie gets mistaken for a girl (this annoys him, though he refuses to have his hair cut) – but he’s also a precociously sinister and sociopathic presence. He comes across less as deceptively angelic fascist larva than as kin to Damien, the Antichrist child in The Omen. Here again, Brady Corbet is under no obligation to follow Sartre but, in departing from the original The Childhood of a Leader, he comes up with a dramatically flat illustration of what makes a totalitarian: the child monster turns into an adult one.
It’s no surprise that Corbet steers his film to a decidedly grandiose conclusion. Lucien Fleurier’s fight to assert his identity and his achievement of ‘leadership’ qualities signal, according to Sartre, not only the developed sensibility of a political fascist but also Lucien’s readiness to succeed his father as boss of the family firm and the workers it exploits, and to take ownership of a wife. The film’s final section – entitled ‘A New Era, or Prescott the bastard’ – shows the hitherto unnamed child grown into the awe-inspiring leader of a totalitarian country. For a British audience, the connotations of Prescott in recent national politics make this a less than ideal name for an autocratic head of state – but the conclusion is confusing in other and larger respects. First, the historical specificity of the post-Great War setting of the bulk of the story – reinforced by occasional insertions of newsreel footage – now gives way to a synthesised, imagined totalitarian society. Second, the adult Prescott is played by Robert Pattinson, seen in another role earlier in the film. It’s possible that Brady Corbet means to imply that the journalist played by Pattinson is the biological father of Prescott – there’s a moment when the diplomat-father is confronted by his wife and Charles Marker emerging from a room together – but this makes little realistic sense, since Prescott is by now already about ten years old.
Tom Sweet is, as well as a dominant image, a highly skilled young performer, though there’s little sense of what’s going on in little Prescott’s mind. In the adult cast, Yolande Moreau, as the indulgent housekeeper, and Michael Epp, as an interestingly troubled economist involved in the treaty negotiations, make the strongest impression. In the role of the boy’s governess, Stacy Martin, as usual, is striking to look at and anti-climactic as soon as she speaks. Brady Corbet, his editor Dávid Jancsó and the actors build up considerable tension within the strange household yet this doesn’t connect satisfyingly with the political thread of the material. Corbet was barely twenty-seven when this film premiered (and won prizes) at the 2015 Venice Film Festival. He has made a remarkably confident directing debut. But The Childhood of a Leader, under its compelling technique, is intellectually weak and emotionally inert.
25 August 2016