“The Sixth Child”: Maternity | The echoes

Sara Giraudeau et Judith Chemla autour du sixième enfant.

Posted Sep 27, 2022, 4:01 PMUpdated on Sep 27, 2022 at 5:57 PM

In this new school year, the theme of motherhood obsesses French filmmakers for the best. After Rebecca Zlotowski with “The Children of Others”, the moving portrait of a woman (Virginie Efira) who tries to find her place between her new companion and the latter’s young daughter, another director tackles to the subject by escaping the psychologizing clichés and scriptwriting facilities.

In “The Sixth Child”, his first feature film, Léopold Legrand directs Franck and Meriem. A couple belonging to the travellers’ community, they make a living on the meager means in a caravan on the outskirts of Paris where they pile up with their five children. The forthcoming birth of a sixth child and the trouble with the law of Franck, a scrap dealer who engages in illegal activities, further aggravate the situation of these two characters worn out by precariousness.

At random during the legal proceedings, Franck and Meriem meet another couple: Julien and Anna, both lawyers comfortably installed in the upscale neighborhoods. Despite social and cultural differences that resemble chasms, the two couples sympathize. And they sympathize all the more as an a priori implausible “arrangement” germinates in the minds of the protagonists. And if, in the most total illegality, Anna, who suffers in the depths of herself from not being able to become a mother, buys the unborn child and pretends to be her real parent?

Social and moral

From such an argument, inspired by a novel by Alain Jaspard (“Crying rivers”, Editions Héloïse d’Ormesson), one could fear a trying parade of scabrous and tearful one-upmanship. It is not so. With these four characters quickly overwhelmed by the consequences of their “deal”, Léopold Legrand modestly and restrainedly stages a story of clandestine adoption and a destructive cycle that sends each protagonist back to his intimate contradictions.

Anna and Julien, the two lawyers, break the law to satisfy a desire for parenthood that has become an obsessive quest. Meriem and Franck, to escape misery, initially accept a “market” responding to a distorted logic of supply and demand and which contradicts all their values.

Despite some overly insistent scenes, the filmmaker, well helped in his task by his four formidable actors (Sara Giraudeau, Benjamin Lavernhe, Judith Chemla and Damien Bonnard), tells us this social and moral story with a dry line and a sense of humor. lines that best serve its disturbing intensity.

The Sixth Child

French movie

by Leopold Legrand.

With Sara Giraudeau, Benjamin Lavernhe, Judith Chemla. 1:32 a.m.

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