What drives writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children is the drama of the aging single woman full of good intentions which are never responded to in kind, or with any form of reciprocity, by the world around her. Certainly not by the men who populate such a world. This recognizable figure is embodied by Rachel (Virginie Efira), a high school teacher whose life seems designed around failed attempts at motherhood. She goes out of her way to help students who don’t want to be helped, makes regular visits to a gynaecologist (Frederick Wiseman) who only has bad news to give, and becomes quickly attached to Leïla (Callie Ferreira-Gonçalves), the young daughter of her lover, Ali Ben Attia (Roschdy Zem).
Much of Zlotowski’s film is spent in this space of vulnerability we could call the feminine position. Rachel’s precarious proximity to an object of desire—a child—seems to always be dangling in front of her, ultimately barred from her possession, whether it takes the form of a 16-year-old student she wants to mother and who has much less ambitious career plans than the ones she nurtures for him, the doctor who announces time and time again that the chances for her to have a baby are increasingly low, or the daughter-by-proxy that the love affair with Ali provides her, who already has a mother of her own, Alice (Chiara Mastroianni).
The baby-obsessed woman, or the woman who mistakes the baby as the savior for her anxieties over love and death is a familiar prototype. But Zlotowski tries hard to introduce screen elements that complicate it—elements that serve little pragmatic function within the plot and that work, instead, as reminders of what’s at stake for Rachel. For one, there’s recurring presence of the mother, Jeanne (Anne Berest), of one of Leïla’s judo classmates, and whose cancer evokes the dread of finitude that might be part of a particular (mis)usage of the figure of the baby as strategy for disavowing one’s inevitable demise. Disease isn’t enough of a reminder that dreaming up the baby is rarely about the baby but a narcissistic strategy for survival.
The film’s plot eventually leads to a car accident involving Leïla while Rachel is driving. They survive physically unscathed, but Ali only having eyes for his own child’s wellbeing wounds Rachel in irreparable ways. Or, perhaps, Ali’s allegiance to his own child—not to Rachel, nor the child she’s left to dream up alone—allows her to acknowledge the wounds that she always had. Can she tend to them on her own, without the baby as appendage, or stopgap?
Other People’s Children is a small and delicate film that softens the overt clarity of its subject matter with fleeting sequences that display the awkwardness and sheer impossibility of being a woman who doesn’t respect the normative temporal markers of womanhood. Such as being married at a certain age, to a man without the baggage of already having had a family of his own, and getting pregnant before the age of 35. These are the film’s most authentic moments—the ones that leave Rachel breathless, cutting her plans for making up for lost time short.
Take the mix-up about who was supposed to pick up Leïla from judo practice, which results in both Rachel and Alice, the child’s actual mother, showing up. Rachel discretely puts away the sandwich she’s brought for Leïla. In another scene, Ali outsources the heavy load of parenting to Rachel matter-of-factly so that he can watch a sports game. And elsewhere, he literally leaves their baggage behind at a train platform for Rachel to pick up so he can run after Leïla.
Other People’s Children exists somewhere between a superficial trifle of mainstream French cinema and a more nuanced art film. It sometimes resorts to infectious songs (Doris Day’s “Again” and Georges Moustaki’s “Les Eaux de Mars”) to articulate its meanings. And though Zlotowski seems to want to hold on to an accessible aesthetic, the film is saved from becoming overtly topical or unidimensional through the moments when it veers away from predictable visual language. As in the insistence on close-ups of Efira’s face. It’s a strategy that reaches its zenith at the very end of the film, when Rachel receives a very rare and disarming gift—not in the shape of a baby to call her own, but that of a former student, who had previously dismissed her emotional investment in him, and who now only has gratitude to give her.
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