The titular quiet son in Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s The Quiet Son is, it turns out, not that quiet after all. He’s quite outspoken about one subject in particular: the merits of France’s far-right.
Fus’ (Benjamin Voisin) newfound passion for the white nationalist movement comes as a surprise to his dad Pierre (Vincent Lindon), a rail worker who spent his youth plastering antifascist posters across the same train lines he now tiredly maintains. A premature widower, Pierre prides himself on having raised Fus and his younger brother Louis (Stefan Crepon) to be kind, compassionate men who share his beliefs about the importance of honest labour and contributing positively to their community.
But then Fus begins hanging out with young thugs with shaved heads. It isn’t political, he says. They are just kids wasting time after football matches, fooling around. Will their beloved Bordeaux make it into the Premier League this season? Unlikely. But then they are just kids harassing African immigrants online. And then they are just kids prowling outside supermarkets and accosting people of colour. And then they are just kids with brass knuckles and crowbars, looming. Planning.
Therein lies the central issue of The Quiet Son, a film so frustratingly set on infantilising grown men it circumvents the conversation around accountability entirely. The Coulin Sisters set out to build a cautionary tale on the easiness with which the far-right can convert the susceptible, cushioned middle-class, but find in this susceptibility a crutch for permeating their unhurried drama with a dangerous sense of passivity. In an unfortunate mirror to the mentality of bigots, The Quiet One heedlessly attributes blame to all but the grown men whose hate-filled rhetoric directly fuels life-threatening actions
The film’s English title does little to disperse this rhetoric of exemption. Switching the original Playing With Fire to The Quiet Son changes the framing of this story from the direct consequences of one’s actions to a slippery idea of silence as permission — or remission, in Pierre’s case. The Coulin Sisters are much less concerned with delineating the tactics supremacists employ in their conversion than they are with punishing Lindon’s ageing rail worker, an infuriating throughline that culminates in the film’s emotional climax: a monologue so outrageously misguided as to have one asking if The Quiet Son is actually in favour of us all showing a little more leniency to fascists as long as they have loving families.
While one may be cautious of placing moral judgments upon a fictional story, The Quiet Son is far too intent on rooting its fiction in the factual to merit the luxury of the unaccountability it so easily grants its characters. The Coulins set their story by the border of Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, and pepper their film with newscasts on the boiling cauldron of European white nationalism brewing in the region, proving all too aware of the very real, very urgent consequences of the dangers of such idealism. That they still make a film this willing to focus the conversation on redemption shows that the cautionary tale The Quiet Son succeeds in building is not one on the perverse sneakiness of recruitment but on the dangers of rooting a story solely on the flimsiness of good intentions.
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