Is The Sixth Child based on a true story? In theaters since Wednesday, this drama around motherhood is Léopold Legrand’s first production. The film was multi-awarded at the Angoulême Festival, including the audience award.
What is it about ?
Franck, a scrap dealer, and Meriem have five children, a sixth on the way, and serious money problems. Julien and Anna are lawyers and can’t have children. This is the story of an unthinkable arrangement.
True story or total fiction?
Warning, this article may contain plot spoilers. We recommend that you read this article rather after watching the film.
The Sixth Child is an intense drama, with a lot of suspense, which one inevitably wonders if it is inspired by a story that really happened. The precision of the scenario, which regularly alludes to what the characters incur, can regularly suggest that this story of the sale of children could have really happened, or may have really happened.
Is that the case ? By delving into the genesis of this film, and therefore of the novel that served as the basis for the screenplay written by Léopold Legrand, with Catherine Paillé, we learn that it was indeed a news item that served as the trigger for the book. This book, titled crying riversis signed Alain Jaspard.
When this book was released in 2018 by Héloïse d’Ormesson, the author Alain Jaspard explained : “This is an idea that came to me one day while reading the newspaper La Provence. In this newspaper, there was a news item that was a couple of gypsies, who sold one of their children to another couple of gypsies, in exchange for a BM and 10,000 euros. It was a very small beginning, but I had my story.”
And to add:Afterwards, I reworked this story, that is to say that instead of making a couple of gypsies with another couple of gypsies, I made a couple of gypsies with a couple of bourgeois. Then I studied history; I became interested in gypsies. I watched a lot of films, by Emir Kusturica, by Jean-Charles Hue (La BM du Seigneur).”
To feed his novel Crying rivers, Alain Jaspard researched extensively, also by attending a Tribunal de Grande Instance. The bourgeois couple played by Benjamin Lavernhe and Sara Giraudeau are both lawyers, and therefore know well the risks involved in the traffic they are trying to put in place with the couple Judith Chemla – Damien Bonnard.
Make the spectator active and put him in empathy with the characters
The film freely adapts the novel, while keeping a very “detective novel” aspect which gives a sustained rhythm to the plot, in particular using ellipses. “My desire was to tell this intimate story in a breathtaking way. Since the characters act in a hurry, it seemed to me necessary that the film take on this same character of urgency in its rhythm and its dramaturgy. With Catherine Paillé, my co-screenwriter, then with Catherine Schwartz, my editor, we constructed the film as a “social thriller”. We imagined a narration made of ellipses and worked around the question of the off-screen. Everything that is not said and that is not shown adds to the tension of the story, makes it possible to make the spectator active and to put him in empathy with the characters. That’s the whole point of this story.“, explains Léopold Legrand in the press kit for the film.
It should be noted that this adoption story resonates intimately with its director, as he indicates in the press kit. Léopold Legrand was adopted before the law by his father’s new wife after the death of his mother (which occurred when he was six years old): “This woman became my second mother. So I grew up with a double mother figure. The story of these two women gathered around one and the same child intrigued me. Closing the novel Crying rivers, I was very moved by the trajectories of Meriem and Anna.”
The Sixth Child is in theaters now.