The Bélier family/La famille Bélier

France 2014

Dir: Éric Lartigau

101 mins  Subtitled

Cast: Louane Emera, François Damiens, Karine Viard

Rating: M

From afar, French director Éric Lartigau’s follow-up to 2010’s hit thriller The Big Picture looks perilously sappy: it’s a post-Glee tale of a musically gifted teenager (Louane Emera) torn between duty to her deaf dairy-farmer parents (Karin Viard and François Damiens) and the show choir that might liberate her from agricultural drudgery. In fact, Lartigau extracts spirited, often funny material from the predicament of a heroine obliged to obtain everything from cattle feed to thrush cream for her folks, while constructing a most empathetic portrait of deafness: consider Damiens’ mayoral bid, launched on the slogan, “I hear you”.

A canny cast earn any final-reel tears honestly: the ever-ebullient Viard proves even more expressive without spoken dialogue, and Eric Elmosnino lends wry support as the choirmaster. It wouldn’t work, though, without the Julia Stiles-ish Emera’s solid-gold knockout performance: both singing and signing, while describing a young woman overcoming understandable reservations about allowing her voice to be heard.

Mike McCahill, The Guardian

Last December, Rebecca Atkinson wrote in the Guardian of a boycott of La Famille Bélier in protest at its casting of “hearing actors to play the roles of deaf characters, the result of which is an embarrassing and crass interpretation of deaf culture and sign language”. In the wake of Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s grim but authentic The Tribe, such a response is understandable, although Éric Lartigau’s frothy comedy about the teenage daughter of deaf parents finding her singing voice has proved a feelgood hit in France, with Louane Emera picking up a César for most promising actress. As Paula, Emera is indeed a winning presence, and it would take a hard heart not to be moved by her rendition of Michel Sardou’s Je Vole, or to appreciate Lartigau’s attempts to convey the musical connection she makes with her parents despite their initial dismay. “Being deaf isn’t a handicap, it’s an identity,” says Paula’s father Rodolphe (François Damiens), a farmer who decides to run for mayor under the campaign slogan “I hear you”, and whose feisty relationship with Karin Viard’s Gigi provides much bawdy comedy. A US remake is, inevitably, in the pipeline.

Mark Kermode, Observer film critic