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‘And Their Children After Them’ Review: A Delinquent Crime Echoes Through the Years In an Overblown Youth Melodrama
Twin filmmakers Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma adapt Nicolas Mathieu's novel 'And Their Children After Them' with an earnest heart and a heavy hand.
Mathieu’s more literary allusions, however, haven’t survived the journey to Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma ‘s overlong, outwardly emotive but strangely unmoving film, which resorts to soap-opera mechanics in its saga of three youths variously affected over a six-year period by one rash act of teen delinquency. Brawny in scope and scale, with emotions writ if not felt large, “And Their Children After Them” (more simply titled “Leurs enfants après eux,” without that dangling initial conjunction, in the original French) feels like the brothers’ big bid for mainstream respectability. Production and costume design are tackily on point for the period (with special credit to the hairstyling team for their timewarp treatment of Kircher’s lush, center-parted boyband mop) but more than one scene is scuppered by the directors’ intemperate, often over-literal use of era-appropriate rock standards by Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Aerosmith and more.
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