Available on DVD: “The Father of My Children”

The Father of My Children is a subtle work on an exceedingly difficult subject. Divulging the subject would spoil a kink in the plot that flips the thing abruptly on its head. Suffice it to say it’s painful — and the pain is a type not often explored on film with quite this delicacy, or quite this calm.

With the exception of that one instantaneous game-changer, writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve’s (All Is Forgiven) tale of a high-flying French movie producer starts slowly, builds slowly, resolves slowly and ends slowly, if indeed it can be said to end at all.

At first, it could be any old portrait of a harried businessman juggling work and family. The first seven or eight minutes follow Grégoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), his cell phone glued his face, as he commutes from Paris to his country home at the close of a long workweek. From his end of several frenzied conversations, we gather that all is not well with his company: An actor is having a hissy fit, a director is dragging his feet, a budget is lurching dangerously out of control.

But once he’s home, snuggling with his wife (Chiara Caselli) and three beautiful daughters (Alice Gautier, Manelle Driss and Alice de Lencquesaing, Louis-Do’s daughter), it’s clear that Grégoire has a borderline-perfect life. Hansen-Løve’s level-headed direction and Pascal Auffray’s serene cinematography underscore this semi-perfection (the trips to ancient chapels, the strolls at water’s edge) without a speck of overstatement, simply laying out a peaceful, pastoral counterpoint to the scrambled uncertainty of Grégoire’s job in the city. The only waves disturbing this sea of calm are Grégoire’s continual phone calls — the bad news piles on — and a single poignant shot suggesting a loved one adrift.

Winner of Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize at Cannes last year, Father of My Children succeeds as the sum of many small details. Observations made in passing prove monumental later on; oblique scenes emerge as central to the plot. Even that long, gassy string of cell calls at the start grows in significance as some connections are broken — phones go unanswered, words go unsaid — and others are revealed. In the second of the movie’s two distinct halves, a much older mode of communication drops major revelations on folks who absorb them, register a modulated shock and move on.

It’s the moving on that matters: The will to accept fate (Que Sera, Sera, sings Doris Day on the soundtrack) and push forward are the name of the game in The Father of My Children. Certain characters do it. Others do not. Therein lies the subtlety, and the pain.