You know a film is good when you're still talking about it several days later. So it was with Three Peaks, directed by Jan Zalbein which I saw at the London Film Festival. However, I was still a little worried that the film might be a dud simply because it was a three-hander, featuring a child. Occasionally, and this is particularly true of British cinema, you get a child in a movie who cannot act at all, for instance, the kids in Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe et al.). We Brits seem to demand nothing of child actors (beyond speaking their lines in the right order) and consequently we get nothing (or less in the case of Harry Potter) while the US has a history of high expectations and correspondingly high achievers from the 1970s to the 2000s, from Tatum O'Neal in Paper Moon, Justin Henry in Kramer vs Kramer, the ubiquitous Jodie Foster, Henry Thomas in ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, through Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense and AI: Artificial Intelligence to Jacob Tremblay in Room, not to mention Dakota and Elle Fanning in almost everything else. I'm relieved to say this is not the case with Three Peaks. Arian Montgomery, who plays eight-year-old Tristan, is a revelation. Entirely believable in every scene; you immediately empathise with his stepfather Aaron's desire to connect with him.
This film is about identity, love, parenthood, fractured families and the effect the last has on all involved. It depicts the predicament of the new man in a mother's life, illustrating how he performs the father role in all but name, depended upon, even taken for granted by the child, sharing in all the labour and reward of raising the boy and, from the opening scene, it seems, completely accepted. And we also see it from the boy's point of view, in which Aaron is the interloper in his family, having usurped his father (whose presence is established by regular phone calls), all complicated by Tristan's own guilt for occasionally preferring Aaron to his father.
Alexander Fehling, who was very good in Homeland, in which, coincidentally, he also had to play father figure to someone else's child, the daughter that Carrie (Claire Danes) has with Brodie (Damian Lewis) although his role is secondary to the main storyline (for more on Homeland, see secretsquirrelshorts), is the easy to identify with Aaron, who has to negotiate the tightrope of this awkward situation, in which he is asked to be a father but never be called a father, in which he plays second fiddle to the whims and wishes of a wilful and demanding but sometimes incredibly charming eight-year-old, and has to handle the pressure put upon him by Lea (played by Bérénice Bejo, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Natalie Wood) who wants to be fair to her child, his father and her new man. Aaron is frequently tripped up (dangerous on a tightrope), courted and betrayed by both.
The rather cosseted Tristan continually tests the boundaries, crossing the line between mischief and malice. He can be deliberately and casually affectionate and just as deliberately and casually cruel. Realising that he's a king in his court, he wields his power accordingly, bestowing and withdrawing his trust randomly, so that poor Aaron is forever placating him in order to gain his favour, scavenging for crumbs at the table. But what the boy gives with one hand, he takes back with the other, pulling him towards him as he pushes him away. Loved and resented in equal measure, with Tristan revealing himself to be capable of minor violence, Aaron is in a quandary. Should he come down hard or brush it off? He opts to ignore it.
Aware that he holds all the cards, Tristan toys with Aaron, who's begun to see him as his own son, and undoubtedly loves him, by calling him 'Papa' just to see how it feels and what the reaction will be - poor Aaron is beguiled and grateful, happily reporting it to the mother only for her to disapprove - he should have made it clear that he's not Tristan's father because Tristan already has a father and this might confuse him. The unfortunate Aaron is in a no-win situation here. If he had said 'Don't call me Papa' I can well imagine the tantrums that might have resulted. From mother and son.
Repeatedly offered an ultimatum by Tristan, as their circumstances become more desperate, and the man's situation more precarious, Aaron, like the people who attended the film's screening cannot conceive that a child would resort to something much more dangerous and violent in order to force a return to the status quo. It's shocking but suddenly, because of the way it's played, also totally credible.
(Stop reading now if you haven't yet seen the movie)
The ending is cleverly ambiguous. At one point, I was reminded of the scene in Before the Fall (Napola) when the character runs out of options and chooses to sacrifice himself. The director realised that such an outcome might prove unpalatable to some audiences (and such it proved at the LFF, where they chose to believe in the innocence and innate goodness of the child despite all evidence to the contrary). We were allowed to come to our own conclusions. We were allowed to hope.
At the time of viewing, Three Peaks had yet to acquire a UK distributor, which is a real shame. It definitely deserves to be seen.
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