Watching your father run circles around the house, chased by the nurses who want to take him in. A child does not forget that. Joachim Lafosse and his brother were already talking about how life with their bipolar father was sometimes like a movie. ‘My father’s illness had something spectacular, très cinematique.’
He is interviewed in Cannes, a day after the world premiere of his tragic ninth feature Lesson intranquiles (the restless). The 47-year-old Belgian filmmaker, in de Volkskrant once proclaimed the ‘master of the oppressive family drama’, the ‘story of his youth’ had wanted to tell for decades. Although the final film is only partly autobiographical. ‘Thanks to the actors, Damien Bonnard (les miserables) and Leila Bekhti (Un prophete), who don’t resemble my parents and gave their own first names to the characters, it became something different from my small, personal story. But the core is absolutely personal. That gist is my desire to say don’t blame someone who fails. One day in my childhood my mother said to me: it is too heavy and too difficult, we must leave him. And my father said: your mother is right. I didn’t understand that then. But later.’
In Lesson intranquiles Artist Damien and his wife Leila struggle with the roles, or labels, that his bipolarity imposes on them: he patient, she carer. Painting is much better when he is off the lithium, but without medication, Damien becomes a loose cannon and an irresponsible father to their son. Lafosse convincingly portrays the relationship between artistry and a manic state of mind, but seeks the heart of his film in the relationship of this Damien and Leila: two people who love each other and want the best for each other, but still can’t make it.
‘It’s a film about two people who end up fighting the same battle: neither of them wants to be stuck in that role of patient and nurse. They want to be seen as a full person by the other. But it’s getting harder and harder for Leila to see anything other than that patient in Damien. And Damien is willing to take responsibility for his illness, but he also says: you can’t expect me to heal. The title, The Restless, is an invitation to all of us: a certain restlessness is part of life. Anger, resistance or denial will not help.’
Lafosse’s father, who was not a painter but a photographer, has Lesson intranquiles seen by now. “He said to me, make it clear when you talk about the movie that you can live with bipolarity. He himself is a living example. My father has not used lithium for thirty years and has not been hospitalized in all that time. Did my mother see the movie? Yes, she was hit.’
Lafosse is known for his preference for the family drama (À perdre la raison, L’économie du couple), but that preference was never a preconceived plan. ‘No, I never thought of it that way. I’ve found that it just is. When I write a script, I never resolve: now I’m going to make something about a family or a family. But once I have a subject and a main character, the characters around it come naturally. Family in general doesn’t really mean much to me. But families are a part of life. And often we suffer from those family ties because they are so fixated. They don’t move or develop.’
Lesson intranquiles partly stems from his friendship with the Ghent painter Piet Raemdonck. “He was very generous and allowed us to use his furniture to build the set, the studio in the film. The canvases we see in the film were made together by him and Damien, especially for the film. Damien spent time with Raemdonck, but also spent time in a hospital, where he spoke to psychiatrists and patients for his role.’
The autobiography of the French bipolar painter Gérard Garouste also influenced Lafosse. “What I read from him confirmed something I remembered about our family: that we, as a family, also dealt with my father’s bipolarity with humor. I was very happy that the audience here in Cannes laughed so much at the scene in which the son Amine teases his father, who hardly responds due to the medication. Because that’s how it was: bipolarity could also be funny sometimes.’
Manic depressed
The Walloon filmmaker Joachim Lafosse, son of a bipolar father, spoke to various psychiatrists for his partly autobiographical family drama Lesson intranquiles. ‘One said to me: don’t forget that we can also learn a lot from these patients. And that’s true. Just look on Wikipedia, how long is the list of artworks created by manic-depressive artists. There are a lot of them.’