Not that it wasn’t already somewhat laden with just as much creep factor as Lolita to begin with, but to add further sullying to My Father the Hero, that 1994 remake of Gérard Lauzier’s “rom-com” (that no girl in her preteens or teens should have been subjected to watching with the wisdom of hindsight), has only gotten ickier with the latest #MeToo-styled report of Gérard Depardieu. Except this time, for increased variety in the endless tales of sexual assault (Asia Argento’s included), this is an accusation not dug up from the annals of the past so much as presented fresh from the frontlines, as the events in question took place on August 7th and August 13th, respectively.
To lend it some Katherine Heigl as Nicole Arnel flair, the “unnamed” actress is in her twenties, roughly forty-something years younger than Depardieu’s sixty-nine (an unfortunate age to be reported for sexual misconduct at). While, no, nothing actually sexual happens between Nicole and her father, André (Depardieu), the implication that it does for the sake of Nicole impressing the three years older to her fourteen (which is quite significant at that age) Ben (Dalton James), a local boy who always mills around the Bahamas during the touristy summer, is already enough to give one the shivers.
Electra complex connotations aside, the allusion to Depardieu’s character exploiting (a.k.a. banging) an outrageously much younger woman–we’re talking outrageous even by French standards–makes My Father the Hero rife with extra cringeworthiness upon revisiting it–and again, it was already well toeing the borderline between being watchable “light-hearted” fun and sheer grossery at the time of its release (and no, some of us cannot unhear Depardieu singing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”). That Nicole has an overt jealousy issue when it comes to André and his new significant other, Isobel (the detached voice of Emma Thompson), only enhances the layers of inappropriateness and Greek-oriented incestuousness of the entire narrative. To appease Nicole’s anger, André goes along with it when he realizes she has been telling everyone that he is her sugar daddy/“lover” (a word that prompts André to retch, “Oh, God! I hate that word. It’s so… so graphic”). Despite his own humiliation–being perceived as what he calls a “child molester” by everyone else–over the knowledge that this is the dynamic people believe is going on between them, he runs with the pack of lies because placating Nicole’s whimsy for fabrication forces her to treat him with more kindness than she has since the divorce.
That everyone on the island exhibits only mild shock over the revelation that spreads throughout the resort like wildfire–thanks, in large part, to Ben himself–is telling of the similar way in which the society of now reacts. Sure, people are morally repulsed by the idea that Depardieu took advantage of an ingenue under the pretense of giving her “professional advice” at his apartment, but, at the same time, they’re somewhat titillated by the prospect. Someone to direct their salivating-for-a-witch hunt glands at. That the My Father the Hero plotline centers on a girl who manipulates the story of sexual impropriety for her own advantage is also not lost on viewers of life’s documentary called Navigating What to Believe in the Latest Sex Scandal. For yes, there are many in a reluctant to get too vocal faction of #MeToo naysayers, Woody Allen included, who believe that the “movement” is nothing more, at this point, than vindictive “warlock trials” designed to oust the patriarchy in the best and only way women know how to/have seen immediate results from at this juncture.
In this way, My Father the Hero bears far too much uncanniness perhaps ever to be viewed again for any reason other than to do a study on sexual Disney films that managed to eke by the studio’s greenlight in the 90s, not to mention one of the only instances of an Electra complex ever being billed as a “romp” (excluding, maybe, Girl, Interrupted, depending on your sense of humor). So yes, one supposes that it would be less astonishing to watch Depardieu in one of his more recent roles as a politician based on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, accused of assaulting a hotel maid. In fact, it’s not nearly as apropos in terms of the manifold cortexes to the complicated divide between genders in the ongoing saga dubbed #MeToo. And also My Father the Hero.
