Families Like Ours: the ending explained by Thomas Vinterberg
The director justifies the last episode, and the choices he made for Laura, Elias or Jacob.
The beautiful and powerful story of Families Like Ours has just ended on Canal +. The 7 episodes of Laura’s adventures across Europe have come to an end. Denmark is no more. And while waiting to know if we will soon find it for a season 2, the director and creator Thomas Vinterberg explains the ending to us.
Spoiler alert!
In particular, he explains the fate of Elias, who was left for dead in Poland, beaten by xenophobes. But in the end, he got through it. Alive and well, he was even found by Laura in Finland, in the final sequence of Mathilde’s wedding!
A kind of happy ending, Thomas Vinterberg assumes today, but that he had not written like that at the start:
“4 years ago, Elias died” confides the director that Première met at the end of 2024.But my wife thought the scenario was too depressing, that it needed to be infused with a little hope. I then changed my vision of things and I found that it was essential that they meet again.” Thomas Vinterberg admits all the same to having demonstrated a certain narrative cowardice at the time:
“I’m happy if people call it a happy ending. But at the same time, it’s a refugee story and it can’t just be a happy story. Refugees die every day in the world and if I If I had been a little more honest, I would have gone to the end and killed Elias. But I couldn’t. Some people may be disappointed, but I don’t think many of them will be. .”
Laura’s decisions, too, disappointed some spectators, who did not always understand her life choices: “I know that Laura also divides the public a lot. People don’t always understand why she gave up her boyfriend, her life in Paris, her promising future, to go help her mother in Romania. This says a lot about the vision of Love today. People tend to approach relationships as a transaction: What’s in it for them? What will they get out of it? Now, Love, in the first sense, the Christian sense of the term, thinks of itself in a disinterested way: How am I going to help the other? Allow it to shine? I believe Laura is at the crossroads between these two ways of thinking.“She therefore favored her mother, without a second thought, out of altruistic love.
A choice which also had direct consequences on the life of his father, who lost his place in Paris and who found himself having to do housework to survive: “Jacob is a bit sacrificed at the end. Because not everyone can come out a winner in this story” recognizes Thomas Vinterbergwho also explains that he wanted this ending for him because he “was the most privileged to begin with, so it made sense that it fell on him from a narrative point of view.“He tempers despite everything:
“I don’t see everything bleak when it comes to Jacob. At the end of the series, he smiles, he is at peace with himself, with his wife’s decisions. He finds himself doing housework? So what? ?Too bad, he is actually happy and no longer has this need to provide absolutely. So yes, he is sacrificed, but at the same time, I believe that I saved him.
