‘Other people’s children’: Borrowed loves

To the French director Rebecca Zlotowski has always liked to capture a different, rebellious and daring femininity in her filmographyfrom that young woman with a taste for illegal racing in ‘Belle épine’ to that emancipated twenty-year-old who breaks with the concepts of Arab culture in ‘An Easy Girl’. The director takes a real leap forward with her fifth feature film, ‘Other People’s Children’presented in the Official Selection of the 79th Venice Film Festival and awarded for the best editing at the 18th Seville Film Festival.

‘Other People’s Children’ focuses on a reality that cinema has rarely addressed with the humanity and charisma it required, that of middle-aged women who have not had children (either by their own decision or because life has led them not to have children). The protagonist is Rachel Friedman, a 45-year-old high school teacher who specializes in teaching adolescents at risk of social exclusion. The woman deludes herself with Ali, an industrial car designer, also a middle-aged man whom she met in guitar lessons.

The film begins as if it were a romantic comedy., boy meets girl, an evening of dreams, followed by a night of passion. And it’s over the frenzy that the film begins to show his cards, when Rachel sees that in Ali’s apartment there is a room that clearly belongs to a girl and to see that his budding love is divorced and has a four-year-old daughter. From there, Zlotowski focuses on how one person enters into a relationship with another, with all its consequencesthat is, with that metaphorical backpack that happens to live with other people’s children from a previous relationship.

Truly, What Zlotowski, who also signs the screenplay, tells is life itself. There is nothing strange in a world where it is common to find half-siblings or arrejunta couples where each party brings offspring from previous relationships or where one of them has no descendants. However, Attention has rarely been paid to this reality, much less with the humanity and affection with which Zlotowski does it with a childless woman who suddenly finds herself caring for and taking responsibility for a four-year-old girl who makes her rethink their decisions.

A film full of humanity and affection

Here is Virginie Efira, who has proven in recent years that she is one of the best actresses of her generation, the one that has the challenge of showing the different prisms of the role of stepmother, a family position little considered by public opinion. Zlotowski not only ennobles it, but knows how to give it an extraordinary thickness, introducing a series of everyday situations that delve into important detailsin how an apparently trivial comment turns into a clear gesture of grave contempt or how an extraneous situation can lead to a terrible marital quarrel.

Zlotowski perhaps shoots his most personal film (declared by the filmmaker herself, who was inspired by her own sentimental reality to create the story and the protagonist and who, by the paradoxes of fate, became pregnant during filming). The director captures a film whose feminist spirit is seen in every daily gestureespecially in relation to the non-motherhood of her protagonist, whose decision not to have children is a constant question she asks herself, especially when her gynecologist warns her that her biological clock indicates that her time is running out. “It’s not that I think a woman isn’t complete without children, but it’s a collective experience that I don’t have access to”he says in one scene.

On the other hand, the director builds a careful portrait of what it means to face a couple who comes with the ‘extra’ of having children, about how to enter an already created circle, like those actors entering the second season of a hit series and who have the challenge of dazzling an audience accustomed to certain characters. Also the fact that younger relatives have children, which shows that uncomfortable look that is given to those who, being older, have not had children.

In this sense, Zlotowski makes it a masterpiece, the roundest in his filmography. The filmmaker has the virtue of transforming everyday life into a cinematic experience, in the wake of Mikhaël Hers, with a feminine gaze in which she gives her characters a profound humanism and in which puts on the front page realities that exist but have not had that moment of protagonist that they so much deserve on the big screen (Even in small details, such as that moment in the shower in which the camera captures the man’s naked body, to show how much she is attracted to her partner). Furthermore, with a positive approach, with bright scenes and a look that looks ahead.

‘Other people’s children’ honors the statements of the future director a tribute to those independent and free women who have decided not to have children. A cinematic jewel, splendid and full of affection for his characters, to whom Zlotowski gives an unusual humanity, in which a good person can hurt another, life itself, portrayed with that affection that only great directors know how to capture for the public.

Note: 9

The best: A formidable protagonist, who conquers the hearts of the public. Virginie Efira is gorgeous.

Worse: That the French Film Academy completely ignored this gem at César 2023.