LEADING Australian film-maker Ariel Kleiman’s sere film about a boy raised by a father carrying serious emotional and political garbage, the only other person in the cinema and I wondered what it meant.

Alex (Jeremy Chabriel) has lived all his eleven years in a sort of commune populated by women who have borne children by absent fathers.  Gregori (Vincent Cassel) runs the group in a sort of benevolent demagoguery.  With calm contrasting strongly with his method of achieving it, the film presents Gregori’s discomfiting hope for mankind.  What he has inculcated into Alex is tough stuff, asking many questions about human-kind that reverberate uncomfortably in our present-day world where what children are being forced to undergo is becoming increasingly awful.

“Partisan” raises concern for an intelligent boy who adores his new-born brother.  Alex refuses to eat chicken after another boy in the commune is sent to Coventry for refusing to release a pet bird to meet the fate of all chickens.  Until almost his twelfth birthday, Alex has never tasted chocolate.  And he’s unaware of the moral issue underlying the notion that it is right and proper to walk to the nearby city, enter a high-rise apartment block, knock on a door and, on Gregori’s instructions, identify and shoot the person who opens it.

“Partisan” is not an easy film to love.  Its value is in its bleak observations of mankind’s function in its own company.

At Palace Electric