To Be Continued - And Their Children After Them

Ioana Satmari • 4/25/2025

Draped in an effort to prove “how beautiful life is,” the film steers you through all the messy moments meant to make you truly live it. It aspires to be a symbolic film. A Symbol. It wants to depict adolescence, the transition to adulthood, and all the accompanying tribulations in a stylized, desaturated manner that paradoxically lacks real symbolic depth.

Leurs enfants après eux / And Their Children After Them, directed by Ludovic Boukherma and Zoran Boukherma, is a coming-of-age odyssey with 2014 like boys (despite the film being set between 1992 and 1999). It carries itself with ease, insistent on portraying life as a chaotic string of moments, yet in doing so, it loses thematic coherence. It hesitates between intimate realism and a symbolic aesthetic without fully committing to either. Over-stylized to the point of saturation yet curiously devoid of genuine symbolism, the film feels caught between the desire to say something profound and the inability to do so convincingly.

Melting into (or being consumed by) symbolism, manipulating a distant idea of adolescence that inevitably turns nostalgic, it appeals to those who want to remember “how it was.” Yet the feelings of freedom, melancholy, emotional turmoil, and rediscovery feel incongruent. Through a timid intellectualism, it attempts to tell a story that has already been told by countless other films.

Everything seems to revolve around relationships: between parents and children, siblings, romantic partners, and the protagonists and the world itself. Yet everything is presented in an unconvincing, unrefined manner, as if life hides under a chaos far greater than it truly is. Because chaos, no matter how unpredictable it seems, seeps in quietly, slips under the skin, it doesn’t explode.

From slurred dinner conversations, where food is absentmindedly pushed from one side of the round plate to the other, to the utterly clichéd ending, the film seems to insist that after all of the protagonist’s leaps through life and all the disorderly moments, everything is fine now. At times, the director flirts with an observational approach, relying on physical details: lost gazes, mechanical gestures, a silence heavy with meaning.

There are films that embrace chaos as a natural state, and there are films that attempt to aestheticize it until it becomes inert. Leurs enfants après eux / And Their Children After Them gracefully falls into the latter category, an exercise in style that aspires to be a profound, authentic reflection on coming-of-age but instead lingers in a showroom aesthetic.

After a series of cocktail-like episodic moments, the protagonist inevitably and triumphantly finds himself on a motorcycle, with the road stretched out ahead, a sequence that promises closure. Yet it’s not an open ending, but an indecisive one, a contrivance designed to create the illusion of personal growth that, in reality, never occurred. The film suggests that everything has been resolved, that every moment of confusion and emotional turmoil was merely a necessary step to reach this point. But this “to be continued,” left hanging, only betrays the lack of an authentic perspective on maturity.

With its cardboard-cutout realism, a simulacrum of life’s true disorder, and its open-ended road, Leurs enfants après eux / And Their Children After Them feels more like a concession to a cliché.