ABSTRACT
Moments into Anne Fontaine’s Comment j’ai tué mon père Jean-Luc Borde (Charles Berling), a successful gerontologist, enters the living room of his sumptuous Versailles mansion, and distractedly opens his mail. A voiceover – apparently ‘reading’ the letter he holds – intones, ‘We regret to inform you of the death of your father which occurred last month in Africa. He was unable to return to France as he had hoped’. As he finishes the letter, Jean-Luc sinks dejectedly onto the arm of a sofa and glances out the window at his wife, Isabelle (Natacha Régnier), reclining in a deckchair, then lapses into a kind of trance which is accompanied by lush but eerie chamber music. Fontaine effects a transition from Jean-Luc’s vacant expression to a gala soirée which his wife Isa has organized to celebrate an award given to her husband in recognition of his civic service, by the Mayor of Versailles. In the middle of his speech thanking the Town of Versailles for this honour, Jean-Luc realizes that the letter announcing his father’s death is apparently either a sadistic joke or a terrible
mistake, for there, standing before him, is his father, Maurice (Michel Bouquet).
