THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
A few months after having probed the horrors of a city tower in a metaphysical closed door (Tower, 2023), Guillaume Nicloux invites bioethics in a story where the question of paternity is a real puzzle… Joseph (Fabrice Luchini), a widowed cabinetmaker and anchorite, learns of the tragic death of his son and his partner in a crash air. The two spouses leave behind Rita (Mara Taquin), a surrogate mother who will shortly give birth to their daughter in Belgium. Sensitive to the fate of the future baby, of whom he immediately feels like the grandfather, Joseph sets off in search of the young Flemish woman.
This adaptation of the novel The cradle, by Fanny Chesnel (Flammarion, 2019), makes us feel how new forms of medical assistance for procreation, and more particularly surrogacy (GPA), prove to be a powerful algorithm capable of delivering an incalculable number of absurd stories… The press has already reported on several of them: a surrogate mother sells her baby to one couple before entrusting him to another; intended parents change their minds but their surrogate mother refuses to have an abortion; a woman opposes an embryonic reduction and gives birth to triplets… More recently, we remember the parents gathered at the Ukrainian border in the hope of recovering their babies born from surrogacy.
Narrative highway
We would undoubtedly take more pleasure in savoring the story of this fatherhood by proxy, which takes up themes dear to Guillaume Nicloux (filiation, mourning), if, at every second of the projection, we did not have this impression of to be embarked on a too marked narrative highway on which the old man and the young woman bond, in the service of a fetus which represents for one a renewal, for the other bad luck. The filmmaker’s taste for conceptual bets seems here to be put through the mill of the practical case.
After the heartbreak of the inaugural crash, The little is struck by a form of indecision, oscillating between melodrama and histrionic comedy which seem to have to seek a compromise in a systematic lightening of the subject. This makes for a first meeting that is almost a joke. At the end of a laborious search in all the bicycle shops in Ghent, where Rita said she worked, Joseph heard a woman moaning with pleasure and instantly knew that he had found her. Miracle of life.
Pregnant, Rita replays the myth of the mother and the whore. Between the Virgin and Mary Magdalene, there is Joseph. The latter has the whim of wanting to be a father while leaving all the responsibility to the young woman. We are frankly moving away from the non-conformism to which the filmmaker had accustomed us with his burlesque Houellebecq (The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq2014, and Thalasso2019).
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