***SPOILERS***
The Lost Son is a terrible shame of a movie. All the way through you can see how good it should have been and isn't. The script is just awful, and none of the many good things about the film - the acting, the lighting, the atmosphere - can save it.
Daniel Auteuil, in his first English-speaking role, plays Xavier Lombard, a Paris policeman now living in London and working as a private eye. As the film opens we see him taping a couple making love in the hotel room next to his: he follows the woman when she leaves and hops into her taxi. We learn that he has been retained by her husband to find out if she is having an affair. He has compromising photos and the tape. However, her husband is not paying him enough, and he sells her the evidence, telling her husband nothing is going on. So, he has dodgy morals. He wears a black leather jacket, chain-smokes, lives in a seedy block of flats, is lit with his face half-shadowed...ah, the traditional noir private detective. Like the assassin in Leon, he has a pet and a friend: Leon had a plant and a twelve-year-old orphan, Xavier has goldfish and a prostitute he knows from his Paris days, Nathalie. She is his closest friend, and a handy underworld contact; she is saving money to get out of prostitution.
A friend from his Paris days, Carlos (Ciaran Hinds), calls him and presents him with a profitable case. Carlos, a Brazilian ex-detective, has married into a nouveau riche family, and the son of the family, a recovering heroin addict, has gone missing. The parents, although snooty, seem genuinely worried about their son. Not so Carlos' wife Deborah (Nastassja Kinsky), who is very hostile to Xavier and insists her brother Leon is just off on another drug binge.
Xavier tracks down Leon's girlfriend, living in a lonely house on a headland in Falmouth, Kent. She has not seen Leon in over a month: he turned up with a young mute Indian boy, and charged her with taking care of the child before going off again. Leon has stumbled on a paedophile ring, and Shiva is one of the abused children, whom he managed to rescue. She gives Xavier a tape Leon left with her; when Xavier plays it back in his flat, it shows a few frames of Sleeping Beauty, and then cuts to a home video of Shiva being abused. Xavier instinctively ejects the tape: even his blunted moral sense is outraged.
He uses Nathalie's underworld credentials to get himself in on the paedophile scheme: the girlfriend has told him Leon mentioned "the Austrian", and with this slender lead Nathalie puts him in touch with the right people. The whole affair is run like any ordinary business: he is asked if he wants his "puppies" brown, yellow, or white, trained or untrained, and shown Polaroids from the category of his choice so he can make a final decision. Then he is brought to a hotel where all the rooms are soundproofed and fitted out with whips, chains, handcuffs, masks, anything he might require. Finally, he is told the firm runs a 24-hour after-sales service, offering convenient and safe disposal if the puppy should get sick or die.
This part of the film is truly horrifying. It is impossible not to think of Marc Dutroux, not to be aware that this really happens, is happening while you're sitting in the cinema. The people Xavier is dealing with act like any other professionals closing a deal, they wear suits, have nice cars and mobile phones: they look like bankers. Later in the film Xavier will meet the man running the international child-abuse ring: he says he is just a businessman, that what he does is just import/export. Knowing that there are people out there who really think like this, who really deal in children and see what they do as a business arrangement, makes these scenes utterly chilling.
Xavier shoots his way out of the hotel with the child, taking the office administrator with him and forcing him to disclose the name and address of his boss. When they get to the house it is deserted: the snivelling captive insists his boss, Friedmann, is away on business in Mexico. Xavier locks him up, searches the house: finds a map of Mexico and a set of architectural drawings. Then the captive escapes and attacks Xavier, telling him he is a dead man anyway, that he doesn't understand what he is dealing with. Xavier shoots him in the struggle and leaves, first calling the police and anonymously notifying them about the hotel. This is an irritating loose end - we never find out if the police act on this information, if the children are freed.
Xavier goes by Nathalie's flat and finds her with her throat cut, her body covered in bruises. Horrified, he takes the child he has rescued and goes down to Leon's girlfriend: she patches him up, agrees to look after the child, and Xavier heads off to Mexico. From here the film descends into clichéd melodrama. He penetrates Friedmann's compound, filled with happy children whom Friedmann has taken off the streets, who do not know what is in store for them. He is captured, imprisoned, beaten up, and eventually manages to escape, killing Friedmann and his henchmen and driving the kids to a nearby church mission.
He ends up back in London: then comes a final, embarrassingly obvious "twist". At least, I think it was meant to be a twist, although I can hardly believe that the filmmaker thought there was anyone out there who wouldn't have predicted what the "surprise ending" would be in the first twenty minutes of the film.
One of the things I hated most was the ridiculous attempt to give Xavier a Terrible Dark Secret Trauma. In these days of therapy and Oprah it seems a character just isn't interesting if he doesn't have some awful psychological burden to carry. Even worse is the feeble way the writer tries to create some feeling of suspense about what his Trauma could be. Deborah asks him why he left Paris: he walks away without answering. Later he asks Carlos anxiously "you didn't tell her why I left Paris, did you?" . He drops dark hints about things "going wrong for him". Eventually - and boy, we're on the edge of our seats by now! - he reveals that he killed a man involved in a drugs bust which was a joint French-Brazilian effort. He was tried for murder but pleaded self-defense: Carlos, the only witness, backs him up. Although acquitted, he lost his job, and came to London where his friend Nathalie had made a home. Of course, he is guilty: he shot the man because he believed he had organized the car bomb which killed his wife and child. (This scene is actually well-filmed; Xavier's little girl is waving at him from the car window when the car explodes. Knocked to the ground by the blast, Xavier finds himself looking straight at the charred, blackened body of his daughter, whose eyes are open, staring glassily at him. It is a very strong image).
So, not only is Xavier a killer, but he has lost his family. Two Traumas for the price of one! That may sound flippant, but I really hate this tendency in modern films to base every character nuance on PTSD. People can be complicated and difficult to understand without anything particularly terrible happening to them. I would have found it more interesting trying to explain Xavier's moral ambiguity if he had just had the usual knocks life hands out. But that's only my opinion (hell, this whole review is only my opinion 8)).
One other complaint - towards the end of the movie Xavier is down on the beach at Falmouth doing some target practice. Shiva is with him watching, and he shows him how to fire the gun, letting him squeeze off a few shots. It really brought home to me how violent our culture has become. Bonding by shooting things together? The NRA would be delighted. Somehow I preferred the days when father and son went out and played baseball.
It may seem strange in light of the foregoing remarks, but I still felt this film was worth the ticket price. Daniel Auteuil is one of my favourite actors, and he is terrific as always as Xavier. Having to learn English for the part clearly presented no obstacle. He is particularly strong in the aftermath of Nathalie's death, when he talks about her to Leon's girlfriend. His distress is wholly convincing. He makes the character interesting, complex, and believable, despite what he is given by the scriptwriter. The other core characters, Nathalie and Leon's girlfriend Emily, are also well-acted - Kate Cartlidge does the best she can with a stereotypical tart with a heart of gold; Emily is more interesting, a fragile but resilient artist who has chosen to live on the isolated headland, looking after this mute and wounded boy. She is well and sympathetically played.
Ciaran Hinds tries hard to do something with the Carlos character, but it's pointless. It's hard to see why this character should be Brazilian: it doesn't add anything to the story - it could have been an English-French drugs bust - and it really comes across as though the writer just wanted as many interesting accents in there as possible, or thought he might get funding from Brazil if he put a Brazilian character in. I suppose you could say, why *not* make him Brazilian, but in that case they ought to have gotten an actor who could do a believable Brazilian accent, and had a real Brazilian, not a lavish, flamboyant, back-slapping expansive cigar-smoking stereotype.
Chris Menges is better known as a lighting cameraman than a director (his only previous film as director is the excellent A World Apart) and this film is lit with his usual cold blue light, with warm yellow contrasts. It creates a very atmospheric London, gritty and cold: something like the urban London we see in many modern British films, but not so relentlessly hip. And the headland, filmed in grays and blues, shot through with the bright lights of passing ships, is made dreamlike, isolated, an island of safety for Xavier and the children.
With all its faults, this film is good to look at and well-acted: I didn't resent the money I'd spent on it. With a better script, it could have been a really good film. It's just a shame so much talent went into a film with a duff ending.
(c) Jennifer Mellerick 1999