“To Life” accurately explores the torments of young mothers

THE WORLD’S OPINION – DO NOT MISS

Aude Pépin’s first documentary has the finery of a very pure gesture, extremely
simple, and which nevertheless carries with it decades of conquests so that women reclaim their bodies and the knowledge that goes with it. And he had to be found this character that he would only have to follow in the field to learn as much. In this case, Chantal Birman, liberal midwife and feminist, in practice for forty-nine years and who, soon to be 70 years old, is preparing to retire.

With her small suitcase, sometimes accompanied by Eugenie, a trainee, Chantal crosses experiences and social classes, goes to young mothers in the grip of all these torments meticulously kept out of sight: postpartum depression, breastfeeding, the transformed and marked body, the anguish of being a bad mother.

The guilty myth of maternal fullness

How to film this? To this question, Aude Pépin chooses the front, which far from being shameless, produces an intimate report about her: we will remember all these portraits of women captured in close-up. The staples on the lower abdomen, dark circles, tears, heavy breasts, archisensitive nipples, immense loneliness – in fact, men are almost absent from this film which seeks to make us cross this feminine disarray. All these images were lacking and fortunately crack the guilty myth of maternal fullness, in fact full of failures, ignorance, fear of doing wrong.

Opposite is the beautiful portrait of Chantal, a midwife that few things can stop, and who struggles, teaches, transmits, practices, has seen everything, lived everything: the tragedies of clandestine abortions, the fight for contraception. , the Veil law, the lack of resources of the public hospital which distorts the beauty of the profession … Gently bringing out a political conscience at the heart of her film, Aude Pépin manages to address all the facets and temporalities of her subject, her struggles past and to come, and to place words, faces and bodies, where there was nothing.