It's almost immediately apparent, despite the radical shift in location and culture to a modern-day Parisian outer suburb and a black immigrant family, that we're basically in a remake of Ozu's Late Spring, where all the other characters serve as peripheral gravitational forces acting on the father-daughter pairing at the the centre. To be fair, Denis readily acknowledged the borrowing, so the question has to be what has been changed and whether it's for the better.The spirited daughter is certainly an update on Ozu's meekly petulant Noriko, as is the world-weariness of Denis veteran Alex Descas in comparison with the stoic good humour of his Ozu counterpart. But the dynamic remains the same: the neediness of the child unwilling to strike out by herself, in the guise of an insistence on nurturing a father who'll be left alone. The theme works because of its universality, and some well-thought out scene set-ups and a liltingly beautiful soundtrack make for a rounded whole. Whether we really learn anything, however, is a different question.
6/10
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