104 min | NR | April 21, 2023 | Music Box Films
Rachel loves her job, her partner, and her life. Then she falls for a man with a five-year-old daughter who is not hers, and discovers she wants to mother a child she has no claim to. Loving someone else’s kid means loving the part of them that can be taken away.
Rachel Friedmann is a teacher in her forties who has not had children and has stopped assuming she will. She starts a relationship with Ali, a divorced father, and slowly attaches herself to his young daughter Leïla. The film is about the specific tenderness of loving a child who belongs to someone else. Rebecca Zlotowski refuses to treat the stepmother role as either a consolation prize or a trap. She treats it as a real form of love with its own real grief, because the more Rachel commits, the more she understands that her place in Leïla’s life depends entirely on the adults who actually hold the rights to her.
Virginie Efira plays Rachel with a watchfulness that never tips into self-pity. She lets you see the calculation behind Rachel’s warmth, the way a woman who wants to belong learns to read a room of people who already do. Roschdy Zem plays Ali with easy charm and a quiet evasiveness that explains the marriage that ended. Chiara Mastroianni plays Alice, the ex-wife, without a trace of villainy, which makes Rachel’s position harder rather than easier. Callie Ferreira-Goncalves plays Leïla as an actual small child, unsentimental and distractible, so the bond Rachel builds with her feels earned rather than scripted.
Zlotowski writes and directs with a restraint that trusts the audience to track emotion in faces instead of dialogue. She shoots Paris in warm natural light and keeps the camera close to Efira, letting reaction shots carry scenes that another filmmaker would over-explain. The editing favors ellipsis. Time jumps forward without announcement, so a relationship accumulates the way real ones do, in skipped weeks and sudden milestones. The casting of documentarian Frederick Wiseman as Rachel’s fertility doctor is a sly touch, an observer of institutions placed inside the most intimate of consultations.
This is a film about wanting something the structure of your life will not guarantee you. Rachel does everything right and still has no standing, because love and legal claim are not the same thing. Zlotowski has the discipline to follow that truth where it leads rather than soften it with a tidy resolution. The result is a clear-eyed portrait of a woman building a family on ground she does not own, and choosing to build anyway.