31/08/2024 - Anne-Sophie Bailly delivers a moving and cleverly controlled melodrama about the bond between a unique son and a mother who is also very much a woman

Charles Peccia-Galletto and Laure Calamy in My Everything

"Do you want to play at being an adult? Think about the consequences". Raising a disabled child, whatever the disability, is nothing short of a vocation, and cinema has already drawn from this highly emotive subject on many occasions and in many different forms. But focus isn’t often placed on the phase where the child has grown up and now dreams of emancipation, bringing fresh worries and complicated situations for the family which surrounds and protects them. This is the crux of the moving work My Everything [+see also:
trailer
interview: Anne-Sophie Bailly
film profile], French director Anne-Sophie Bailly’s debut feature film, which was unveiled within the Orizzonti competition hosted by the 81st Venice Film Festival.

It’s a shock for aesthetician Mona (Laure Calamy) when she learns that her thirty-year-old son Joel (Charles Peccia-Galletto), who’s lived with an intellectual disability since birth, is expecting a baby with Océane (Julie Froger) who is also disabled and who works in the same specialised institution as Joel. Océane’s parents are also thrown by the news, first and foremost her father who raises virulent questions over his daughter’s ability to give informed consent. But they’re definitely in love, which does nothing to alleviate Mona’s serious doubts over her son’s suitability for such a future, given that he needs constant supervision and has always been told that his father lives in Antarctica. And the fact that she’s just initiated a relationship with a Belgian man (Geert Van Rampelberg) who she met in a bar makes the news even more overwhelming. Torn between her excessive maternal instinct, her son’s iron will ("I want the baby, it’s my right") and her desire to enjoy her own life as a woman, Mona soon implodes and the situation slips out of her hands…

Built upon a clear and no-frills screenplay written by the director herself, the film maintains an ideal distance between a naturally melodramatic subject and the need to explore the world of disability with respect and without sliding into the trap of excess pathos (as stressed in Ecclesiastics, quoted in the story: "there is a time for everything ; a time to weep and a time to laugh ; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing"). Exploring the viewpoint of the mother, whilst also ensuring an accurate portraying of the character of this special son, Anne-Sophie Bailly sensitively demonstrates how "abnormality" isn’t always found where we’d expect it. The result is a beautiful and nuanced portrait of a woman ("I won’t let you preach at me") played with the energy that’s so typical of Laure Calamy (who offers up another variation on the "mother courage" role, on the heels of Full Time [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Eric Gravel
film profile] and Her Way [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]). She proves a true asset in this dynamic and tightly paced first feature film, which switches settings rapidly and which makes the delicate societal question of disability accessible to all without being scientific or naturalistic but, quite simply, human.

My Everything was produced by Les Films Pelléas in co-production with France 3 Cinéma and Pictanovo. Les Films du Losange are steering international sales.

(Translated from French)