My Father The Hero Parent Guide
Parent Movie Review
Gerard Depardieu, a leading actor in France, plays the role of Andre, who is the father of Nicole, a spoiled 14-year-old girl that he has not seen in many years. He picks her up from her mother’s apartment in New York, and whisks her off to the Caribbean for a perfect vacation. As the days go by, she falls in love with a 17-year-old boy to whom she starts fabricating an endless story of lies, including that the man she is with is not her father but her lover. She also decides that she is 18.
This movie makes an ambitious attempt to produce a loving, heartwarming story about a father’s love for his daughter. In reality, it presents a girl who is a spoiled brat, and uses the excuse of being ignored by her father for her actions. These include wandering around wearing next to nothing and continually trying to pick up men much older than herself. When she walks, you expect her hips to dislocate.
At first Andre is upset with Nicole’s behaviour, until they have the expected crying scene where she tells him how often he has forgotten her. The movie would do well to end there, as it seems they ran out of story. But instead the plot continues, with Andre being ruled even more by his daughter, as he starts fabricating stories with her. The goal of all this is so that she can eventually win the heart of the older boy, who admits in one scene that he is interested in her because she seems “easy”.
Movies love to use sex as a marketing tool, but you may want to consider how appropriate it is to have a 14-year-old doing the selling. And don’t worry about missing a good story because the writers already did.
Updated March 12, 2009