In his first fiction for television, the director of “war is declared” weaves a delicate comedy around the improbable pregnancy of a septuagenarian.
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It’s like Valerie Donzelli gave you a good bourrade in the back to send you valdinguer in the apartment of a lady you do not know, at a delicate moment of the life of this one. The first episode of Nofa and his daughters demands that we go an aberration: Nona (miou-miou), who has just joined the cohort of the septuagenarians, discovering pregnant, provoking stupor and fright at his three girls, Gabrielle / Gaby (Clotilde Hesme), Emmanuelle / Manu (Virginia Ledoyen) and George (Valérie Donzelli), the small last of his triplets, the one who stayed at Mom, in an apartment at the foot of Montmartre.
But this stupor does not last. The shock wave of the new spreads, timidly first, causing private earthquakes before putting the rest of the world upside down. From the second episode, disbelief vanishes to allow the place to wonder. From this postulate that could have exhausted in a few plans, Valérie Donzelli weaves a light veil made fantasy and emotion, on which she draws very precisely the characters to whom an irreproachable distribution gives a life as irrefutable as poetic.
Above the three girls – the stiff sexiologist like justice, the mother who did everything to thwart his mother’s feminist and the 40-year-old who refuses to leave childhood – there is the Matriarch. The Nona of Miou-Miou is as vulnerable as the daughter without mooring of the valges (1974), from Bertrandier, as determined as the woman Flic (1980), of Yves Boisset.
Columnist of manners
On the other side of the genre, the director and screenwriter – with Clemence Madeleine-Perdrillat, Ovni Coscenarist (s) – assembled an impressive collection of men, almost all out of standards: the old German doctor as Incarre Rüdiger Vogler, formerly interpreter of election of Wim Wenders; The transi lover that Campe Michael Vuillermoz (baptized “André Breton”, because we are well above reality); the male midwife that accompanies nona in his pregnancy (Barnaby Metschurat); The ambiguous researcher who wants to help George to finish his thesis (Antoine Reinartz) and the modern but helpless man, husband of Manu, who tries to update his virile software (Christopher Thompson).
All are put in motion in unpredictable directions by what happens to the grandmother who has devoted so far the clearest of his time at the family planning. These trajectories remain harmonious, because the most fleeting of the characters is treated with attention and a delicacy allowing the interpreters to come out of their usual register (see Leonie Simaga in the role of the collaborator of Nona at the schedule).
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