“My Father’s Son”: Father-son relationships in the age of artificial intelligence

The opinion of “Le Monde” – Not to be missed

It will not have escaped the summer moviegoer, finding in the theaters the double grace of spectacle and freshness, that the distributors had clearly squeezed into their holds a reasonable number of Chinese films. Among these, My Father's Son , which reveals a young talent unknown in our latitudes, strongly recommends attention. In this second feature film (the first not having reached us), Qiu Sheng, 35 years old, tackles, as its title indicates quite clearly, a subject as they say universal.

Each type of filiation has its own unique character. In the chapter on fathers and sons, we find the necessary rivalry, the unexpressed love, the structuring relationship with the law, and ultimately, often, the remorse of having understood a certain number of essential things too late to share them with one's father. This does not exclude the hypothesis of parricide, as some somewhat extreme Greek or Viennese texts suggest.

Suffice it to say that there is material here for very beautiful cinema, as evidenced, at the firmament of this art, by The Kid (1921), by Charlie Chaplin, There Was a Father (1942), by Yasujiro Ozu, The Moonfleet Smugglers (1955), by Fritz Lang, The Misunderstood (1966), by Luigi Comencini, Little Odessa (1994), by James Gray or even The Return (2003), by Andrei Zvyagintsev . All other things being equal, My Father’s Son demonstrates a beautiful delicacy, shows narrative audacity and brings a motif as old as the Bible (one will reread chapter 22 of Genesis for this purpose) into the era of artificial intelligence.

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