Following up his overlooked La Sapienza, director Eugène Green is back with The Son of Joseph, which after coming to Berlin, NYFF, and more, will arrive in U.S. theaters early next year. Led by Mathieu Amalric, Fabrizio Rongione (La Sapienza; Two Days, One Night), Natacha Régnier, Victor Ezenfis, and Maria de Medeiros, Kino Lorber has released the U.S. trailer for the Dardennes-produced film, which has a distinct sense of humor and energy — seemingly not to far off from Amalric’s recent film My Golden Days.
While at Berlin, Guy Lodge quite liked the film, writing for Variety, “No one behaves quite like a human being in Eugene Green’s “Le Fils de Joseph,” yet a soulful sense of humanity emerges from their heightened declamations anyway. Though it’s still steeped in its maker’s very particular formalities of language and performance, this honey-drizzled, farcically funny fable of an unhappy teenager seeking a father — first the one he has, then the one he deserves — could prove to be Green’s most commercially accessible work, even among arthouse auds not necessarily attuned to its millefeuille layering of theological symbolism.”
Check out the trailer and poster below with a hat tip to The Playlist.
Eugène Green drops biblical motifs – Abraham and Isaac, Mary and Joseph – into this genuinely contemporary setting as if it were the most natural thing in the world, augmenting them with nods to crime films, Italian Baroque music, a Doisneau photograph, three 17th century paintings and an artificial way of speaking that is anything but current. The characters are positioned within the visual compositions and look directly into the camera, their diction flawless. Whatever needs saying – and that’s a lot – they recite impassively, in declamatory fashion. Along the way, there are jabs at the literature milieu and trendy yuppies. A film where divine seriousness rubs against bizarre comedy, where theology meets caricature, an intriguing film, anachronistic and innovative in equal measure.
The Son of Joseph will be released on January 13, 2017.