Beau Pere

Beau-père (1981) is Bertrand Blier's provocative French drama, available to watch online on iFILM. Rémi is a struggling bar pianist stuck in a marriage that has quietly fallen apart. When his wife dies suddenly in a car crash, he is left with Marion, his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter, who refuses to go live with her biological father.

Patrick Dewaere plays Rémi as a passive, drifting man who never sought any of this. Marion (a debut by Ariel Besse) chooses to stay, and her attachment slowly turns into something neither he nor the audience is prepared for. Blier builds the film on pure discomfort, his camera neither condemning nor excusing, leaving every moral judgment to the viewer.

It is Blier through and through — a director who spent his career probing the taboos of French society without a hint of moralizing. The film competed at the Cannes Film Festival and remains divisive to this day. This is difficult, uncompromising European auteur cinema, best suited to viewers who seek out the kind of film that refuses to make things easy. Stream Beau-père (1981) online on iFILM.