Â鶹ԼÅÄ

A mother and her two grown-up sons come to blows in Private Property, an edgy family drama from Belgian director Joachim Lafosse. When divorced fifty-something Pascale (Isabelle Huppert) decides to sell her ramshackle farmhouse to open a B-and-B, her sons Francois (Yannick Renier)and Thierry (Jeremie Renier, his real-life brother) are peeved. Despite both being adults, neither is willing to let go of their mother's skirt tails. As tensions rise, it seems no property is truly private - least of all a mother's personal life.

Opening with a dedication "To our boundaries", this psychological drama ruthlessly ratchets up tension as all kinds of lines are overstepped. An early scene sets up the ominous Oedipal dynamic brilliantly, Pascale modelling a neglige as one of her sons looks on. Laffose underscores the unspoken sexual frisson casually, vaguely troubling scenes showing the brothers sharing a bath or disturbing their mother's own bathing routine hinting that all is not quite right here. As sublimated sexual desires simmer, Private Property invites us to follow the back-and-forth rhythms of argument and counter-argument - until puncturing the fraught atmosphere with grim finality. Even though we're resigned to the inevitability of violence, it's still a shock.

"HUPPERT IS SUPERB"

Huppert is superb, her lonely heroine both sympathetically vulnerable and yet also slightly culpable for her sons' terribly selfish behaviour. Eager to finally cut the cord on these twenty-somethings - who do little but lounge around playing videogames waiting to be fed - Pascale hatches plans for a better life. But her attempts to free herself are constantly thwarted by Thierry's raging refusal to accept anything that might disrupt the pampered domesticity he's accustomed to. Both sons should know better. But the tragedy of Private Property is that while Thierry and Francois are grown-up, neither are yet mature enough to be adults.

Private Property is out in the UK on 18th April 2008.