A Thorn in the Heart

[Thorn in the Heart]

Directed by Michel Gondry

[At Village East Cinema]

Runtime: 86 min.

As in his 2005 feature Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, director Michel Gondry can’t help reinventing movie genres and techniques—even when ostensibly attempting a documentary. With his new family memoir Thorn in the Heart, Gondry, the instinctive experimenter, pitches viewers into the midst of blood relations with a dining scene where kinships and fondnesses as casually revealed. Gondry makes you look into the screen—makes you invest—during an era when most moviemakers simply want to distract you.

Focusing on Aunt Suzette, the matriarch of the Gondry clan, Thorn in the Heart shows an inspiration for Gondy’s own originality. Aunt Suzette taught school in a rural village and maintains a pedant’s keen memory for family tensions and affections that include her own difficult relationship with her son Jean-Yves. Throughout the film’s investigation, Gondry reflects the inspiration found in his Aunt’s character: her charm, imperiousness and individuality. She’s sometimes unlikable, but her principled candor is always admirable—sort of like Gondry’s refusal to play the usual genre games.

Thorn in the Heart gives evidence of familial customs unique to French society such as Aunt Suzette and Jean-Yves’ subtle anxieties that evoke the domestic portraits in such recent films as Roman de Gare and Summer Hours. In fact, thin, gray-haired Aunt Suzette bears some resemblance to the punctilious, almost cold matriarch played by eccentric icon Edith Scob in Olivier Assayas’ film. The difference is that the Scob character’s perversity seemed like an Assayas hipster indulgence rather than the jarring-yet-accepted family peculiarity that Gondry captures with such modesty and sensitivity. No family revelation in Thorn in the Heart is as alarming as the reprehensible Capturing the Friedmans, but Gondry observes small aftershocks (even genial ones like Aunt Suzette running into two now-adult former students) that are sometimes as good as anything in the great old days of cinema verité.

Although Thorn in the Heart is a very minor film—more proof of Gondry’s restless inventiveness, such as the many sketchbook videos collected in his Director’s Series DVD—it nearly shines as an example of the decent, principled, admirable non-fiction filmmaking that has become almost extinct in our corrupted Michael Moore, reality-TV era.

After the occasional missteps of Be Kind Rewind and his contribution to the omnibus Tokyo!, Gondry displays the same artistic individuality that distinguished his best films Human Nature and The Science of Sleep. It’s undeniable from Thorn in the Heart’s respectful view of family history, crisis and affection that Michel Gondry not only loves his family but loves his art form enough to re-discover the virtues of cinema verité for himself.