“LET ME DOWN EASY,” Bettye LaVette begs, in the searing 1965 soul nugget that opens The Wolberg Family, Axelle Ropert’s trenchant, aurally dazzling debut feature. The plea, sung to a lover right before a breakup, could just as easily be the appeal overbearing Jewish paterfamilias Simon Wolberg (François Damiens), a proud small-town mayor, makes to his wife and two children, who, fed up with his grandstanding and prying, insist that he change. This small, modest film explores, with persistent acuity, one of life’s thorniest struggles: how to carve out an identity wholly separate from one’s kin.
In her screenplay for La France (2007), directed by frequent collaborator Serge Bozon (he plays Simon’s brother-in-law in Wolberg), Ropert gloriously reimagined both the war movie and the musical. Wolberg, which Ropert also scripted, fulfills an even greater challenge: reinvigorating the nuclear-family drama, one of cinema’s most shopworn genres. “Family isn’t sexy,” Simon’s daughter, Delphine (Léopoldine Serre), a few weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday, announces at the dinner table to her father, a man who insists that what defines a family is its lack of secrets (though he himself is hiding something). Simon’s wife, Marianne (Valérie Benguigui), must also constantly discredit his desperate, suffocating ideas about closeness: “We all have our own private world.” With these pithy pronouncements, Ropert shows that movies about what Susan Sontag once referred to as “that claustrophobic unit” need not constantly erupt into hysteria (cf. Rachel Getting Married) or relentlessly catalogue simmering grievances (cf. Revolutionary Road). What distinguishes Ropert’s celluloid clan is their ability to honestly articulate the complexity—and enormity—of their emotions. Like LaVette, Sam Fletcher (whose “I’d Think It Over Twice” is one of Marianne’s beloved 45s), and Wilson Pickett (whose framed head shot, along with those of other ’60s legends, adorns Simon and Marianne’s bedroom), the Wolbergs stir the soul.
The Wolberg Family screens March 20 and 21 at New York’s Walter Reade Theater as part of “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.” Axelle Ropert will be present at both screenings. For more details, click here.
