French filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski directs Virginie Efira in the role of a childless 40-year-old struggling to find her place as a stepmother. Carrying an intense emotion, the film transcends its social subject to turn into a magnificent work on transmission.
Rachel (Virginie Efira) is 40 years old, no children, except the high school students to whom she teaches French. Her life goes by without a hitch, until the day she falls in love with Ali (Roschdy Zem) during a guitar lesson. Separated from his wife, Ali has a 4-year-old girl, Leila, whom he protects at first by avoiding introducing her to Rachel. But when she meets her, and begins to live more and more with her, Rachel becomes attached to Leila as to her own daughter. Except that Leila regularly sends her mother-in-law back to her fragile and potentially temporary status.
Virginie Efira and Roschdy Zem in tune
Starting with a social subject that addresses this suffering of not finding its place in a world focused on birth mothers, “The children of others” is already proving fascinating in the new look it takes at the archetype of mother-in-law, far from the image of a shrew worthy of a Disney cartoon. It turns out to be overwhelming by marrying all the complexity of a heroine who seeks to emancipate herself from the role that cinema and society would like to attribute to her. In itself, what the film tells might be enough. What he shows, and the way he summons the means of cinema to do it, hoists him to a higher height.
>> To see: the trailer of the film
Like its filmmaker, “The Children of Others” is a lively, fast, removed film, of a sensory intelligence. From the outset, Rebecca Zlotowski breaks the traditional narrative patterns and assumes a more flexible, more sinuous script construction, which never completely reveals its deep stakes. A work that takes on its full meaning through the bodies of its performers, Virginie Efira and Roschdy Zem, totally in tune. The camera eroticizes them wonderfully, the bed scenes take a fundamental place in the story, to the point of awakening all the femininity, all the fragility, which Roschdy Zem can show and which the cinema has only too rarely allowed him.
A profound simplicity
Inspired in part by her own experience, the filmmaker avoids preceding, overhanging her heroine and organically models her staging on her energy, alternating moments of urgency, snatched, overflowing energy, with moments more calm, more introspective. More than empathy, a form of symbiosis between Rebecca Zlotowski’s gaze and Rachel’s emotions unfolds little by little, the source of a romance that finds real depth in the simplicity of its situations.
>> To listen: the director’s interview
Carried by a constant musicality, “The children of others” even shifts the question of upset motherhood, of filiation, to that of transmission, to what we can bequeath to others, to the small trace that we can abandon. in the lives of those who have crossed paths with us, during an unexpected scene that suddenly grips you and moves you to tears. After “Grand Central”, “An easy girl”, “Planetarium” and “Belle épine”, Rebecca Zlotowski undoubtedly signs her most successful film, in any case her most personal.
Rafael Wolf/ld
“The children of others” by Rebecca Zlotowski, with Virginie Efira, Roschdy Zem, Chiara Mastroianni.
