“Les enfants des autres” at VTIFF

France | 2022/3 | Fiction | 103 mins | French w / subtitles

A superb Virginie Efira plays Rachel, a dedicated high school teacher who begins a bittersweet romance with a single dad. Deftly written, directed with a light hand, the film captures moments of acute sadness without ever sinking into sentimentality. It delicately balances humor with melancholy, creating a sharply observed relationship drama that explores maternal instincts and midlife crises with bittersweet compassion.

Excerpt from interview with Zlotowski: “I began by adapting Romain Gary’s novel Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid, a novel that confronts a man’s impotence head on. But something resisted. Not because I couldn’t project myself into this man who was unable to get hard, or who feared no longer being able to, but perhaps because I could identify too well. Gradually I recognized my own impotence, that of a 40-year-old woman without children, who wants one, and in part raises those of another woman. A stepmother without being a mother herself. As painfully commonplace as male impotence, this situation was nevertheless the starting point of a story worthy of being told, having hardly been told before.”

“Other People’s Children is romantic — tender, sexy, very French …. With delicacy and with a sympathetic if unsentimental gaze, Zlotowski has gathered together the story’s seemingly disparate, charming and aching pieces … and turned these fragments of life into a life, one that’s as worth living as it is worth watching.” ~Manohla Darvis, NYT