Mark Reviews Movies: CUSTODY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 23, 2018

With his feature debut, writer/director Xavier Legrand pulls off a subtle and expertly executed bit of trickery. Actually, it's more akin to an act of sleight of hand involving genre and audience expectations. Custody opens with a court hearing. There are two sides: a wife and a husband. They have separated, and now, their attorneys are making arguments involving the custody of the couple's 10-year-old son.

We know nothing about these characters (Legrand made a 2013 short that involved them, but one cannot always expect that a feature-length follow-up will retain the basics of its predecessor's story). We only know what they and, mostly, their legal representation have to say about themselves and each other. The hearing offers no clear picture.

Through her lawyer, Miriam (Léa Drucker) more or less insists that her husband Antoine (Denis Ménochet) is a bad man. He has a history of abusing her and their now-18-year-old daughter, who says she wants nothing to do with her father. There are a few incidents that Miriam could cite, but there's only one that has any kind of documentation. The daughter's hand was injured. Miriam says it was Antoine who did it, and so does the daughter, who, like her younger brother, isn't present at the hearing. The medical report makes a passing reference to Antoine, but it's nothing specific in regards to his actions.

The testimony of the son, read by the judge before the four participants, is a bit more direct. The boy doesn't want to have a relationship with his father. He doesn't want to see Antoine hit Miriam again. He doesn't even refer to Antoine as his father. He is only "that man" in the boy's story.

This seems cut and dry, but then Antoine's lawyer begins the counterargument. The report about the daughter's injury isn't enough to condemn her client as a child abuser. Miriam hasn't provided solid evidence of any other incident. It was she, after all, who took the children and moved without telling Antoine, the children's father, where she was going. Clearly, something is amiss with the son's testimony, because what 10-year-old boy refers to his own father as "that man"? The boy has been coached, the attorney claims, or Miriam, who hasn't allowed Antoine access to his children, has influenced the son's opinion of his father in some way.

Whom do we believe here? Antoine seems normal and states that he just wants to see his son. His attorney tells the judge that cases like these aren't black-and-white matters. Legrand is painting a murky picture in this lengthy opening scene, shot mostly in close-ups so that we can calm, collected faces relating and determining the facts of this case. Nobody gives anything away, so we're only left with the conflicting accounts of the kind of man that Antoine is.

The rest of the film feels like a test for the audience. We've been presented with the evidence and the arguments against it. We've seen Antoine appear and sound genuine in his desire to be a part of his son's life. Such a scene establishes a certain set of expectations for an audience: There are two sides to this story of a broken marriage, and it's more than likely that both halves of the couple had some role in its breakdown.

We keep waiting for the other shoe to drop—to learn that Miriam may have her own agenda or be as bad an influence on her children as Antoine might be. After all, this is some kind of domestic drama, in which, as the lawyer says, things aren't black and white.

The story follows Julien (Thomas Gioria), the 10-year-old son, after Antoine has been awarded joint custody of the boy. Julien will be with Antoine every other weekend, and most of the early scenes focus on the father-son relationship. Again, Antoine seems perfectly normal at first—embracing his son and kissing his head. Julien clearly doesn't want to be with his father (There's something almost robotic in the way he leans in to be hugged by his father), and there's a strange game miscommunication that he plays with his parents. Is he trying to keep things as neutral as possible between them, or he is trying to prevent some kind of outburst from Antoine?

Legrand continues to confirm our expectations involving Miriam's possible role in this through her relationship with Joséphine (Mathilde Auneveux), the older daughter. The two don't talk much, and when they do, the mother is often critical of how her daughter's relationship with her boyfriend Samuel (Mathieu Saikaly) is holding the young woman back from her musical studies at a conservatory. The daughter has learned how much to give away and what information she needs to hold back from her mother. There's a scene involving a pregnancy test that is intentionally never raised again, because, at some point, this relationship has become broken, too.

So much time is spent with Antoine, though, that we keep thinking there might be more to him than the stories that have been told about him. If Antoine is such a monster, why would Legrand follow this man, see his perspective, and, at times, almost elicit sympathy for him? That's part of the trick: showing us how Antoine operates and daring us to continue seeing him as just a man with another, equal side of this domestic dispute. What actually unfolds with Antoine's story, though, is a chilling dissection of the man, whose understated attempts to manipulate Julien turn more desperate, whose desire to be with his family again transforms into outright stalking, and whose behavior becomes increasingly aggressive, until there comes a point that there's only one, terrible outcome for this tale.

The real trick is that Legrand has made a thriller, but we aren't fully aware of it until it is far too late for these characters. Because Legrand invests so much time and attention to the dynamics of this broken family, the stakes are exponentially higher without ever becoming exploitative. There are scenes of such intensity that it almost becomes too much to bear, because we've come to know Antoine and how far he's willing to go to get what he wants—to have complete control over these people. Custody is a harrowing experience, rooted in the terrifying reality of abuse.

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