* * * * *I was completely engaged in this film, and when it was over, I didn't know how to talk about it.
There aren't many traditional elements to deal with Ma saison preferee. There's a story, but it’s hard to find any Aristotelian structure to it unless you focus on the mother, and she’s not who you spend most of your time with in this film. And there are characters, but they don’t move to any revelations, act on hubris, learn anything or experience personality growth. Well, not much….
Ma saison preferee, instead, just shows us relationships and gives us info about the people involved in them to let us fill in the gaps. But it does this by showing us such a rich breadth that we feel like we know who these people are, and by the end of the film, we almost predict how they’ll act and what they think. It’s a very unique movie in giving so much information and insight but not seeming to move in any particular direction. We watch Emilie and Antoine interact with each other, with their mother, with others they know, and we learn about them intimately as they do so, but in the end, we’re left with a brother who is so close to his sister that he’s truncated his own life and a sister who has always coped by organizing and directing. We see these two personalities reveal and express themselves throughout the film, we learn what has created them, but by the end of the film, there’s no great insight of social importance. We’ve simply seen an intimate portrait of how a particular brother and sister relationship has developed and how it functions. It’s the depth and intimacy of the portrait that makes this movie so fantastic.
And as I see so often in Techine’s films, there’s a fabulous excess in Ma saison preferee. If the film were simply giving the history and present of Emilie and Antoine, there would be no need for the kids Anne, Lucien, and Khadija. Yet the three, along with Bruno, get plenty of screen time and have their own depth. They’re more shallow than Emilie and Antoine, but the other characters do more than reflect or introduce element of the main two siblings. They have their own development, conflicts and personalities, the kids perhaps beginning to reflect the influence of the parents as Emilie and Antoine reflect the influence of theirs (Antoine’s talking to himself if an especially obvious example of this since his mother does the same thing).
It’s a film about families, about modernity, about France and about generations and siblings. On reflection, I’m delighted at the range of experience and knowledge in this film.
Last note: Again, I note the absence of a father in a Techine movie. This film focuses on Berthe and her effect on her kids Emilie and Antoine. And of the parents in the film, we see much more of Emilie than of Bruno, who appears just a little hapless even though Anne is partial to him. All the fathers I’ve seen so far are inarticulate or clumsy. Techine is certainly partial to the role of the mother, another original element of his work.
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