The first French films have pride of place in this Wednesday’s releases. At the same time as Jérémie Périn (Mars Express) and Rudy Milstein (I am not a hero), Delphine Deloget is the happy discovery of the week with Nothing to lose, her first feature film, a never melodramatic drama of a great accuracy. But the director is not quite a beginner. Winner of the Albert-Londres prize in 2015, she distinguished herself in the world of documentaries before joining that of fiction. And by offering the main role to Virginie Efira, she could not have afforded herself a better entry card.
Heartbreakingly, the actress plays Sylvie, a barmaid at night in a café-concert in Brest and a single mother close to her two boys, Jean-Jacques, the eldest, and Sofiane. But this youngest with a hyperactive tendency has a little too much fries… and he likes them a little too much too. One evening when his mother is working and his older brother hasn’t come home yet, he gets the urge to cook some and ends up in the hospital with second-degree burns. Fortunately, nothing serious, but the domestic accident will set off a hellish spiral. As the boy was alone, the hospital made a report of neglect to Child Welfare, which itself launched a procedure to place Sofiane in a foster home and break up the family unit.
Delphine Deloget plays on this gray zone of social services with a blurred border, while 70% to 80% of child placements today are decided following a failure in their environment and not due to mistreatment. But if the scenario, very well documented, is based on real testimonies, the film then frees itself from it. He leaves a raw realism to focus on the portrait full of life, almost carnal, of a woman who does not give up, the survival instinct anchored in her body, despite increasingly insurmountable obstacles.
Under constant pressure, escaping from the frame, she fights a bit like Don Quixote against windmills, never stops, runs away, vociferates, revolts, lets off steam by destroying a burnt gas stove or by bursting balloons. ‘a canceled birthday. If our empathy pushes us towards this character of a loving mother despite these weaknesses and touching in her determination to recover her “toad”, the other actors do not make up the numbers. Nothing is Manichean and everyone has their own truth.
India Hair, in a support group of distraught and resigned parents, disturbing in the role of the social worker who is afraid of missing out on an abused child, Félix Lefebvre, a young actor who has exploded since François Ozon revealed with Summer 85, in the role of the introverted big brother who must find his place in the middle of this chaos, and Arieh Worthalter, decidedly essential, in the role of the complicit uncle.
Confronted in cinemas with the great Napoleonic battles led by Ridley Scott, this sadly ordinary but heroic fight of a mother, more three-carded than bicorne, also deserves the fields of honor.
The Note of Figaro: 3/4
