Review of the movie Le successeur

The young French director Xavier Legrand’s psychological neo-noir thriller Le successeur tells the story of a son who accidentally, without meaning to, completes a horrible deed started by his father. This film strongly challenges the humanistic optimism that children should not be responsible for the actions of their parents. As in Ari Aster’s horror Hereditary, genetic inheritance is something absolutely inevitable and irresistible; a curse that will catch up with and distort and destroy any attempts, even the most sincere and desperate ones, not to be like a parent.

The main character is a promising young Parisian fashion designer Elias, who takes over from his old predecessor and becomes the new creative director of a famous fashion house. He is preparing to present to the fashion community a new ambitious collection with an emphasis on his signature color of yellow canary. His assistants are preparing a photo for the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, and his great career and creative success is so close that deep down, the rather modest-looking Elias probably feels like a new god…

Suddenly, one call “from the past” unceremoniously shakes the sandy illusion and makes the hero remember who he really is; who he was before he dressed up as a fashion designer on the cover of a glossy magazine… However, it is not only the call that reminds him of his roots, but also his heart. The chest pain that leads to asthmatic attacks makes him wonder if he hasn’t inherited his father’s weak heart…

When Elias learns that his father, with whom he has had no contact for over twenty years, has died of a heart attack, he is forced to return to the place he fled from long ago to organize the funeral and to arrange for his father’s property: A car, a house, personal mothballs… The fashionable Parisian has to return to his native hinterland near Montreal, to his real name (Sebastian) and even to his Quebec accent, which returns uninvited, an irresistible curse of his origin.

He hated his father and spent his whole life trying not to become like him, and now, in an effort to get back to his supposedly completely different life, he orders an express cremation and gives all his property to the volunteers. However, it turns out that Elias/Sebastian has inherited not only a heart defect, and not only furniture and old junk, but also… a prisoner whom his father locked in the basement

According to the director, his second film, The Heir, along with his debut, The Guardianship, are part of a future trilogy about patriarchy, patriarchy in the sense of tyrannical male attitudes towards women, and in the sense of passing on patriarchal “values” from father (patriarch) to son.

Legrand combines the style of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) with a plot in the spirit of ancient Greek tragedy, when dark fate, ill fate, and blood curse had the power of a fatal and inevitable transcendent divine curse. When Medea was doomed to kill her own children, and Oedipus was doomed to kill his father and personally fulfill the evil prediction from which he tried to escape at all costs.

By the way, Elias is a Latinization of the ancient Greek name Ilias. And it’s no coincidence that the designer’s assistants, when preparing the photo for the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, make a stylized reproduction of Henri Matisse’s painting Icarus, about the same ambitious poor man from Greek mythology who attached artificial wings and flew so high that he reached the sun, burned his paper “feathers” and fell to the ground. The cover, of course, was meant to represent only the flight (because we often deliberately leave out the second half of instructive parables, focusing only on the fact that the knight cut off the dragon’s head and omitting that the dragon grew a second, third, fourth ), but the yellow color speaks so eloquently of both the deadly scorching sun and the vulnerable tiny canary under its first gentle and then killing rays.

There is a moment in the movie when the hero is asked to bring a suit for his father’s funeral (“Maybe he had a favorite?”). Elias first brings his (designer) suit. But it turns out that the suit doesn’t fit, because the deceased is two sizes too big. In other words, the hero is physically (and obviously psychologically) so small and frail compared to his father that he is absolutely powerless to resist the influence of the great authoritarian patriarch even from the grave.

In the prologue, we are shown a fashion show. In a long scene with intrusively synthetic music (whose disturbing, growing sounds immediately promise a rapid movement in a very bad direction with no way to turn back), the models walk along a spiral trajectory of a conceptual winding catwalk. This curve with repeating circles is a visualization of the so-called historical “spiral rule,” according to which all the events that once took place and all the types of leaders (patriarchs) that once ruled will be repeated again and again at each subsequent turn of history. And the son will repeat the father, and the son of the son will repeat the father, and the son of the son of the son… And it is impossible to break the spring-loop (except to compress or stretch it), and it is impossible to straighten the spiral, turning the spiral line into a straight line, just as it is impossible to get rid of the congenital literal and figurative heart defect. So all you can do is swallow your tears and pretend.