‘And Their Children After Them’ Review: A Delinquent Crime Echoes Through the Years In an Overblown Youth Melodrama

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic French writer Nicolas Mathieu won the Prix Goncourt — France’s highest-profile literary award — for his 2018 novel “And Their Children After Them,” a working-class Bildungsroman set against a backdrop of severe deindustrialization, for which he stated his disparate influences to include John Steinbeck, Émile Zola, Bruce Springsteen and the 2012 Jeff Nichols film “Mud.” The Springsteen namecheck is easily taken care of in this brash big-screen adaptation, via a thuddingly obvious needle-drop as its bike-riding hero straps his hands across some engines and hits the open road.

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.

The Boukherma twins showed some inventive, genre-jumbling verve in their first three features — most prominently “Teddy,” a kind of postmodern werewolf comedy starring a brilliant Anthony Bajon, which cracked the official selection of Cannes’ called-off 2020 edition.

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.