01/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: The French filmmaker evokes the mechanisms and influences of her parent-child duo film revolving around the question of disability and emancipation

(© Giorgio Zucchiatti/La Biennale di Venezia/Foto ASAC)

My Everything [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Anne-Sophie Bailly
film profile], the debut feature by French filmmaker Anne-Sophie Bailly, was unveiled in the Orizzonti competition at the 81st Venice Film Festival.

Cineuropa: Where did the idea of a film about the delicate subject of disability come from?
Anne-Sophie Bailly: As a teenager, I had a job in a retirement home where I met an octogenarian mother and her daughter in her sixties who had always lived together. When the mother found herself in a situation of dependency, there was no choice but to have her be accompanied by her daughter. I thought it was a truly radical image of what it is to be a parent and a child. I’m from a family of carers, I don’t have disabled relatives but when I spent time in an ESAT (editor’s note: centre of assistance through work for disabled people) to write this film, I realised that I was very moved and felt rather naturally close to the adults with disabilities I was meeting.

How did you approach the two main characters of the mother and her son?
The main protagonist is Mona, but it’s the story of Mona looking at Joël looking back at her. Of course, she’s the one who has to make a choice and it’s her world that’s impacted by the news of Joël’s potential fatherhood. She’s a woman who’s always taken care of her child, but care is as much a gift as it is a curse because it links the one who cares to the one being cared for and that creates a logic of giving and counter-giving. With the transition from a form of assistance to a desire for emancipation, Joël gives Mona back a kind of freedom. I wanted there to be a trajectory of double emancipation that reflects itself in their love stories: Joël lives a wonderful story with that desire to have a child that isn’t disembodied, and Mona also experiences her own with her lover.

You draw the portrait of a devoted mother who is nonetheless a woman.
It was important to me that she sometimes be a bad mother. This moment in the script when she abandons her son was a bit scary when reading it, but I had absolute faith. Because between parent and child, there is an extraordinary degree of intimacy and yet they can always tell each other “you’ve got it all wrong, you are wrong about me.” Because in the other, there is also always an intimacy that can’t be grasped. So I really wanted this mother to be able to say “stop”.

It’s a melodrama, but a very well calibrated one when it comes to emotions. How did you control the possible excesses of pathos?
I really wanted there to be some bursts of humour. First, because I find that in drama, humour is a kind of politeness towards the spectator. It’s a preference I get from the theatre. It’s also really funny to see an adult opposing unexpected reasons to the world. In disability, there aren’t only funny things, far from it, but there are also moments I’ve experienced in ESAT that were really refreshing, very funny. So humour came from a script necessity, but also from something inherent to the topic. I also didn’t want these characters to be perfect. Mona is far from being a saint, she’s very unjust, so Joël had to be, too. What is beautiful is to see that they fit together even if they aren’t as insightful about each other as they think at the beginning of the film.

What about the dynamic rhythm of the film?
I had a masterpiece in mind, Gloria by John Cassavetes, where the escape is a pretext for the evolution of the relationship.  I wanted a tangent towards someplace else and I was also thinking a lot about Wanda by Barbara Loden. My film is driven by that, but also towards an emergency, that of pregnancy. One of my main references is also A Child is Waiting, a slightly cursed film by Cassavetes on which he didn’t have final cut and the conclusion of the editing by the studio (the disabled kids must stay in institutions) was the opposite of what he wanted to interrogate. My Everything is a humble response to this disappointment of a moral and closed conclusion on such a delicate, ambivalent, sensitive subject. My film ends with a question, but also with the possibility of an emancipation, the possibility that they might make it out okay.

(Translated from French)