Terre battue

An acute examination of pride, ego, and competition, Stéphane Demoustier's accomplished first feature highlights an especially fraught father-son relationship. When the film opens, middle-aged Jérôme (Olivier Gourmet) has just lost his job as a chain-store sales manager. Despite this setback, he's convinced that he'll be able to begin a new retail operation immediately, going to illegal lengths to do so. At home, Jérôme grows more distant, paying little attention either to his tennis-prodigy son, Ugo (Charles Mérienne), or his wife, Laura (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), who soon leaves him for another man. When Jérôme fails to realize his professional dreams, he begins to focus more intensely on 11-year-old Ugo's extraordinary talents, burdening his only child with his own frustrated ambitions. The extent to which the son feels responsible for his dad's happiness becomes painfully clear when Ugo tries to sabotage his opponent at a championship tennis match - behavior, it would seem, that he first learned from papa. Gourmet will be familiar to cinephiles from frequent appearances in the films of the Dardennes brothers, who served as producers of "40-Love." (St. Louis International Film Festival)