The Thorn in the Heart
(L’Epine dans le coeur)
Directed by Michel Gondry
France, 2009
Cornerhouse, 29 December 2010
A portrait of the director’s Aunt Suzette, looking also at the people who surround her, chiefly her son Jean-Yves.
Suzette had worked as a teacher, many of her pupils being the children of Algerian immigrants. The film visits some of the schools where she had taught and we hear from her former colleagues and from some of her pupils, now grown up. She clearly touched many of these children’s lives but her relationship with Jean-Yves, a former pupil as well as a son, remains a difficult one.
There are a few special cinematic moments – the children playing while wearing ‘invisible suits’ is one – but on the whole this is a straightforward documentary, a personal memoir that is gentle and affectionate rather than excoriating and probing. It is clearly about someone whom Michel Gondry loves and respects greatly, which makes it perhaps a bit disabling and circumspect on occasion.
Radiantly sunlit most times and sometimes moving, meandering a little bit but always engaging, this is nonetheless a beautiful and elegiac film.
Jildy Sauce 