rebecca zlotowski subtle addresses the question of the desire for maternity in a forties who raises the daughter of her companion.
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Rachel (Virginie Efira), 40, has no child, and, for the first time, cinema takes the side of sobriety and interiority to represent those that medicine calls “nulliparous” . He abandons the rehassed figures of the sterile forty-year-old desperate forty-year-old on the path of hormonal injections and the environmental activist who turns her back on the baby to lighten the carbon footprint.
Rebecca Zlotowski, of which it is here the most autobiographical film, offers a clever angle of attack which opens up new perspectives, other than the dismay and conviction of Childfree (“free of children”). Nothing less was expected from a filmmaker, graduate of normal-seu and the femis, who, for ten years, has produced portraits of women in search of sophistication to escape the condition of elementary happiness . In the children of others, she joined an ambivalent character, torn between the pride of belonging to the limited world of women without descendants and the fear of missing out on a huge collective experience with which she is confronted on a daily basis.
Rachel is surrounded by children who are not his: her French students, with whom the professor is particularly involved, and, recently, Leila, 4, the daughter of the man (Roschdy Zem) that she met at her guitar lesson and for which she loosely heals her permanent. One week in two, cohabitation with the little one generates a bundle of questions: how do you become a mother-in-law when you have no children and, in this case, when you encounter difficulties in having it? How to raise the child of another by accepting his helplessness to have some? What place to give to this relationship which depends entirely on the romance of adults?
in the rules of melodrama
We feel how much the director aspires to look at the evolution of this nameless link that is played out between parentage, authority and friendship. In the manner of the post-Divorce classic Kramer against Kramer (1979), by Robert Benton, who recounts the learning of a home father with his little boy with his care, the children of others are Succeeding key scenes of everyday life, presented as steps to be crossed so that frustration becomes more acceptable.
It all starts on the living room shelf. Rachel discovers Leila’s face in a photo setting. Mixture of curiosity and tight heart. It is dark, she says nothing and leaves to take a look in the unoccupied room of the child, which appears to him as the lair of a small ghost. Then, the meeting: Rachel insists on offering Leila a sachet of candy. Seduction company. Despite the tenderness she has him, the child will serve as a currency to obtain the father’s love.
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