The children of the other 8 points
Other people’s children, France, 2022
Direction and screenplay: Rebecca Zlotowski
Duration: 103 minutes
Performers: Virginie Efira, Roschdy Zen, Chiara Mastroianni, Callie Ferreira-Goncalves, Henri-Noël Tabary, Victor Lefevbre, Frederick Wiseman.
Premiere: Available in theaters.
The great success of fiction occurs when it reaches the goal of creating a parallel reality, an invention plausible enough to attest to its existence. That this construction also manages to establish itself as a reflection of reality, making the viewer accept for a while the space on the screen as an extension of the physical world, represents an additional merit. The Children of Others, the fifth film by French filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski, can be proud of fulfilling both tasks. And all from the seemingly simple device of staging a specific moment in a woman’s life. But not any time.
Rachel has passed 30 lengths when she finds herself at the crossroads of two paths, which in her life until now have run parallel. On the one hand, she meets Ali, a kind and affectionate man with whom she has been falling in love like someone sliding on cotton flakes. On the other hand, her gynecologist informs her that if she wants to have a child, the moment is now. Ali has a little girl, with whom Rachel becomes attached faster than the girl accepts her, and that bond works like a placebo. And while she is not enough to satisfy her genuine need to be her mother, she at least allows him to live the illusion of being close to her.
The Children of Others places its protagonist in one of those emotionally ambiguous situations, in which happiness does not necessarily imply satisfaction. Or at least not fully. From the direction, Zlotowski not only takes the time to allow the character to process what happens to him, but also takes into account the time it will take for the viewer to understand and accept those processes. In that sense, the film achieves a highly precise emotional crescendo and never resigns itself to leaving anyone behind.
In times of radical feminism, the director and screenwriter allows herself a look free of dogmas, more attentive to sensitive details. Through this path, she manages to make the political manifest itself with furious clarity, dispensing with dialectical underlining. And she even dares to play with the mold of the happy ending. But she without obvious bets, giving shape to an epilogue in which tenderness and less unexpected love confirm that a film is capable of making the world a less worse place.
Part of the charm of The Children of Others has to do with the emotional commitment that Virginie Efira assumes in the interpretation of Rachel. A superb job that is not limited to the charisma of the actress, which is undeniable, but is enhanced by her extraordinary ability to transit and transmit the different feelings and emotions that the character goes through. Which are not few. Efira manages, through Rachel, that the miracle of empathy takes place in a movie theater, making each viewer assume the desires and frustrations, the joys and disappointments of the protagonist as if they were her own.
This identification reaches such a point that it can even reach the extreme of generating esteem or animosity for other characters, not always in a justified way, depending on the link that Rachel establishes with them at different moments in the story. As if she were a person and not a character, and as if that person was very close. The actress achieves that her work exceeds the always elastic limit of the screen, producing not only an intense illusion of reality, but also of intimacy. For this reason, it is not strange to leave the room thinking that the experience of seeing her -of accompanying her- of her justifies the 125 years it took for cinema to get here. Sorry for so much hyperbole.
2023-08-04 04:39:29
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