French resistance

French director Eugène Green ordered a green tea at his hotel on the Upper East Side, sitting for an interview before heading to a photo shoot and a New York Film Festival screening of his new film. With jeans, a blue pullover sweater, an oxford shirt, a thin black scarf, and wild gray hair, the mustachioed Green looked like an elegant, French Albert Einstein coming in from a walk in his garden.

The director soon explained, slyly, that his birth in New York 69 years ago was a “misfortune”: The fact is, he had never felt like an American. Instead, as a young man he moved away to France, where he found his home language and culture and simultaneously discovered Baroque, medieval, and Renaissance art.

“It was like an earthquake for me,” said Green.

If the director that Variety called “one of the most original voices in French cinema” is not himself an earthquake to the French film industry, he is at least giving it a good shake: Unlike many in French cinema, Green embraces rather than critiques Europe’s Christian past at a time when fewer and fewer Europeans understand Christian references and images. By some surveys, France is one of the most secular countries in Europe. Green’s countercultural new film Son of Joseph is a dry comedic drama full of Biblical references. It was one of 25 films selected for the elite main slate of the New York Film Festival, which concluded in mid-October.

Son of Joseph (or Le Fils de Joseph) ran in theaters in France earlier this year, where Green says it made French audiences and distributors nervous because of its use of Christian imagery. Green says he is neither a “dogmatic practitioner of religion” nor an atheist. He’s trying to “get at the hidden aspects of persons.”

“In France, there is a problem with anything which has Christian references, because atheism is more or less the official religion in France,” said Green, who pursued a career in theater before making his first film in 2001. “It is a problem in France, not only for audience reaction but also for finding the funding for the films.”

Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, acclaimed Belgian filmmakers in the elite cinema world, produced Son of Joseph. The brothers gravitate to films with spiritual themes, and Green said they share a common vision on that front.

Green laughingly recalls a French review of his 2014 film La Sapienza—also full of Christian symbolism—that described him as “an atheist lover of Baroque art” in an attempt to make him sound respectable.

Son of Joseph, in fact, mocks the French cultural elite who deride Christianity: In one scene at a fancy book launch in Paris, a snooty author tells a pretentious book critic that she is planning a walk around Notre Dame Cathedral. “How subversive!” the critic says. (The film is full of puns in French that English speakers will miss, but there is humor Americans can get, like two people looking at their phones who collide on the street.)

“[In France] a large percentage of people simply don’t believe, and even people who do believe … have accepted the French principle of laïcité,” said Brett Bowles, a professor at Indiana University who specializes in French cinema. “They have almost a civic duty to keep that belief private. So that’s not a big part of the market for French TV and film producers.”

Laïcité, a rooted disdain for public displays of religion, is an essential concept to the French. With the rise of Islamic extremism in Europe, the French are holding on to laïcité even more tightly: Many believe secularization must increase in order for European states to survive cultural clashes.

France has various bans on wearing religious symbols, and several seaside towns this past summer banned the full-body “burkini” swimsuit favored by some Muslims. In response to the international outcry (from Americans in particular) over these restrictive laws, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls wrote an op-ed in The Huffington Post to explain French reasoning on such matters.

“The conviction on which the French nation is based is that to have free and equal citizens, religion must fall under the private sphere,” Valls wrote.

France’s President François Hollande as well as candidates for next year’s presidential election, such as former President Nicolas Sarkozy, are harping on the need to restore France’s national identity. Sarkozy, who himself instituted certain bans on religious symbols during his presidency, announced his candidacy in a booklet titled Tout pour la France (All for France), with all the letters in “Tout” printed in blue except for the final “t,” which was red. French social media derisively speculated on the purpose of the red “t”—did Sarkozy mean it as a sign of a Christian cross, in alluding to a “national identity”?

Green, sipping his tea, waved off politicians’ efforts to discover a national identity. Neither Sarkozy nor Hollande have any understanding of cultural history, he said. And forgetting history, for Green, is forgetting who you are.

“Very few people have a contact really with the past of their civilization,” Green said, speaking of both the French and people of the internet age in general who are out of touch with their roots. “They live in the present, but it’s not a real present because the real present contains the past. Their present contains no past.”

Green incorporates the music and paintings of the past into his films. Son of Joseph opens with shots of modern-day Paris—people driving, walking to work—with a 17th-century choral piece based on the book of Lamentations playing in the background. Throughout the film he contrasts the frantic pace of modern life with a thoughtful interior life. So also in his own life: On his flight to New York for the festival he read a book while other passengers watched movies with what he considered much too much CGI.

THE DIRECTOR FINISHED HIS TEA and hopped into a car that carried him over to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in the Upper West Side, where he introduced his film to a packed theater. The New York Film Festival’s main-slate films have distribution already, so it’s not a place where the movie industry “discovers” films as at the Tribeca Film Festival or South by Southwest.

“At the beginning you may be a bit surprised, but don’t panic,” he told the New York audience, laughing.

Son of Joseph, which will have a U.S. run in January, is an art-house film that isn’t for everyone. It develops at a slow pace and the characters speak in near monotone throughout, a style Green uses to emphasize the importance of language stripped of emotion.

The plot tells the story of teenage boy Vincent living with his single mom Marie in Paris. Vincent—in a very door-slamming, teenage mood—wants to find out who his father is. Meanwhile, in one of the film’s several dry comedic tangents, Vincent has a teenage buddy who keeps asking if he will join the friend’s new business venture: a sperm bank.

Vincent has no interest. Instead he is obsessed with Caravaggio’s painting Sacrifice of Isaac, which hangs on his bedroom wall much like a superhero poster would for any other teenage boy. When Vincent discovers that his biological father is a self-important publisher and scum of the earth (who, in fact, prays to Satan), he decides to re-enact the painting—but with reversed roles, in which he sacrifices his father. At the last moment, the “voice of God” stays Vincent’s hand, and so begins a string of slowly unfolding scenes that lead Vincent to a potential alternate father, a wannabe dairy farmer named Joseph.

The movie is divided into five Biblical chapters: “The Sacrifice of Abraham,” “The Golden Calf,” “The Sacrifice of Isaac,” “The Carpenter,” and “The Flight to Egypt.” Green understands the connection between the story of Isaac’s near sacrifice (“one of the most mysterious things in the Bible,” he says) and the story of Jesus’ death in the New Testament, although Green never fully endorses the theology of the gospel.

In one scene Vincent and Joseph go to look at a painting of Jesus after His death.

“It’s sad,” Vincent says.

“No,” says Joseph. “Jesus died because He hears the voice of God.”

Unlike many French art-house films, this film’s ending will leave you smiling as big as Vincent in the final shot. The New York audience gave Son of Joseph extended applause.

But you could sense that Green’s real audience—a somewhat uncomfortable one—was back in France.