Watching Rebecca Zlotowski's Other People's Children, I was reminded of a discussion I once had with a professor. Despite the class focusing on theater, we talked about cinema and what stories deserve to have the camera pointed at them. In short, we debated the merits of dramatizing ordinary people. For me, there's plenty of interest in exploring individuals whose lives are entirely un-dramatic, maybe even anti-dramatic. Great art can be created by investigating the complexities of the simplest-seeming experiences. Just because something appears anodyne or common doesn't mean there aren't beguiling specificities or that we should be above it. My professor disagreed.
At the time, a great deal of the conversation centered around the films of Chantal Akerman, but Zlotowski's latest effort feels like an up-to-date if more conventional, example. Indeed, I imagine my former pedagogue would hate the thing if he ever set eyes on Other People's Children…
You see, one can't argue that its story is in any way unique or that its characters are especially singular beyond their fundamental personhood. Nevertheless, to regard the film is to confront a quiet shattering, a scream that makes no sound, a piece of portraiture that's too specific to be universal in the ways of easy Pablum. I'd wager we've either been Rachel Friedman, will be her, or have met someone similar. She is our protagonist, a forty-year-old teacher whose daily routine is full of small pleasures, a coterie of friends, ex-lovers who've kept in touch, a widowed father and younger sister.
The day we meet her, forgetfulness keeps tripping the rhythms of classroom order, with Rachel almost leaving her guitar at school before heading to after-work guitar lessons. At this long day's end, she makes an acquaintance with handsome Ali, and the two soon become lovers. In glimpses, we taste their attraction, the easy chemistry, the eroticism of their link. All established by a series of quick brushstrokes, it's the sketch of a contemporary woman who's happy but still yearns for something more. Zlotowski approaches storytelling mechanics with an economic shrewdness, devising elliptical cuts to render a tone akin to an impressionistic romcom grounded in middle-aged reality.
At a post-synagogue dinner with her family, Rachel recounts the details of her current joy while filling us in on her minor frustrations. Ali shares a daughter, little Leila, with his ex-wife, and the teacher feels she should get to know her. The delay of their meeting makes the Friedman patriarch speculate on the man's potential unsuitability. At the same time, Rachel's sister is quick to imagine a whole narrative that proves to be premonitory in the picture's boldest gesture. You certainly can't say Zlotowski is trying to hide the inevitable conclusion or make it pass as a surprise. If anything, Other People's Children is a tragedy in slow-motion, fate inescapable.
Time can't be avoided, either. With the onset of menopause ringing like a ticking clock in Rachel's ears, her desire for motherhood split between multiple vectors. On the one hand, some of her impulses are channeled into professional conviction, students supported beyond what some might expect or think necessary. On the other hand, there's her growing attachment to Leila once the two finally meet. It's not an immediate bond, some miraculous connection, or any such Hollywood nonsense. Instead, the film tracks the evolution of their tricky balance, nurtured by personal capitulations and the construction of new routines.
Beyond what Ali or Leila herself might realize, Rachel starts to occupy a pseudo-maternal space in the child's life, though her role is never clear to anyone. Such are the quandaries of forming romantic partnerships with single parents, a situation that shouldn't surprise anyone yet rarely gets the big-screen treatment. These are the disquieting truths of everyday attachment. Degrees of closeness remain in constant flux, flexible, a bittersweet symphony that can unravel in humor or a devastating stab directly to the viewer's heart. Still, the camera's perspective never varies in its commitment to compassion, uncovering the restrained beauty of an unspectacular milieu.
Though modest, Georges Lechaptois' cinematography captures the tensions between characters and articulates the grace of quotidian pleasures. The cutting, by Géraldine Mangenot, is attuned to the rhythms of a script that uses fragmentary observation to reveal galaxies of meaning. Often elliptical, the edits make time feel slippery as it escapes Rachel's grasp, though an iris wipe can also add a note of playfulness. These choices make it feel seismic when the film lingers on the lead's face, disrupting the scene's rhythm for extra beats of laser-focused observation. Some actors wouldn't be able to sustain the mechanism, but Virginie Efira is up to the challenge and then some.
For the past decade, her ascension has been a marvel to behold, yet this might be Efira's greatest achievement. There's none of the grandiloquence of Benedetta nor the comic neurosis of Sibyl, but her Rachel is still fully realized in a way that feels preciously rare. Flexing her comedic muscles in early scenes, Efira makes a feast out of Rachel's idiosyncrasies while preserving the sense of one for whom life feels too short and too long. The echo of disappointment sings out from even the widest smile, speaking of a woman whose younger self envisioned a life much different from the one she has at the dawn of her forties.
When sharing intimacies with Roschdy Zem's Ali, the actress suggests a window into a secret world, rendering us all voyeurs. With young Callie Ferreira-Gonçalves, she'll break your heart, whether with swallowed heart or adoring eyes, an aching farewell. Every other cast member, from Chiara Mastroianni to a cameo-ing Frederick Wiseman, represents another opportunity to refract Efira's Rachel, illuminating new facets. Thus, details accumulate, as do visceral notions, until the audience leaves the movie feeling as if they know this woman inside out, perhaps more closely than anyone in this world. Maybe better than they know themselves.
Cinema as an expression of empathy, art that connects, as a scrying mirror into the mystery of our own soul. Such are the miracles of Zlotowski's Other People's Children and Virginie Efira's performance, incisive feats full of frankness. They will break you with a caress.
As the film gets a limited release in American theaters, check out Elisa Giudici's Venice Diary capsule. Also, here's my review of An Easy Girl, another Zlotowsky gem.