Custody
Jusqu'à la garde

In his début feature, Xavier Legrand expands upon his Oscar nominated short film Just Before Losing Everything.  Reprising their roles in that short film, Lea Drucker and Denis Menochet play Miriam and Antoine Besson, a divorcing couple in the midst of a custody battle. Their oldest daughter Joséphine (Mathilde Auneveux) is just about to turn eighteen, so the majority of this fight is over their 11-year-old son Julien (Thomas Gioria). Julien and Joséphine have made it abundantly clear that they’d rather live with their mother and have no contact with their father, but the court sees things differently. 

In the opening scene, set during the final custody mediation session, Legrand establishes the formal, observational style with which he will tell this story. This reserved, unmanipulative approach is one of many factors that set this film apart from the exploitative woman-in-jeopardy thrillers and the two-dimensional Lifetime movie-of-the-week melodramas that make up the majority of pictures exploring this subject matter. Legrand creates real, flawed, human characters, whose motivations are often difficult to read. He also wisely keeps our primary focus on the experience of the youngest person in the family.  The brunt of this terrible situation falls on the shoulders of young Julien, who Gioria brings to life in performance of such pain, anguish, and confusion that we tense up every time he’s on screen. Menochet plays Antoine as a hulking, heartbroken man who seems imminently capable of terrible violence simply by his physical presence. Drucker plays Miriam as a numb, traumatized woman so afraid of revealing anything to her ex-husband that she’s often paralyzed. 

All the characters are all forced into lying and other damaging but everyday human defense mechanisms, which exacerbate the animosity as well as the stress of the situation. The outstanding cast, and the subtle editing of Yorgos Lamprinos, ratchet up the tension to a heart-racing degree.  The action is so intense and difficult to watch that Custody succeeds as a horror movie far more than most films that actually fall into that classification. Legrand refuses to goose the proceedings with music cues or jump scares but cinematically builds to his climax with sound design, organic shifts in lighting, long, drawn out takes, and by trapping his characters in smaller and more confined interiors with tighter more close-up compositions.

The more we watch, the more we try to understand the reality of what led to this bitter divorce. For those who haven’t seen Just Before Losing Everything, that ambiguity will linger much longer than for audiences unfamiliar with the short. Legrand offers us little in the way of backstory, so we begin to intuit the truth. Our suspicions are confirmed, yet the movie still surprises and shocks.