L’Attachement delves movingly into life, loss, and found family, at Alliance Française on September 3
Strong performances in the story of a French bookstore owner who forms bonds with a father and child make Visions Ouest’s final summer installment a must-see
L’Attachement.
Visions Ouest Productions presents L’Attachement at Alliance Française Vancouver on September 3
VISIONS OUEST WRAPS a strong series of francophone summer films with its most engrossing installment yet. Director Carine Tardieu’s deeply human L’Attachement—or, in English, The Ties That Bind Us—has all the feels: it’s about love, family, life, death, feminism, sex, friendship. And yet not once does it hit a sentimental or sappy note.
That’s in large part thanks to French acting veteran Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as unmarried bookstore owner Sandra, who lives a self-absorbed but happy existence alone in her Rennes apartment with her novels, paintings, and ever-present cigarettes—until a knock at the door. A woman’s water has broken, the couple across the hall is racing to the hospital, and they need someone to look after little Elliott (unaffected discovery César Botti). The wry, intellectual career woman and the serious kid eye each other suspiciously—the blunt child informs her she “knows nothing about little boys” (he heard his own mother say so). But in this fully absorbing film nothing happens as expected: in fact, the literary, gently forthright Sandra may just be the perfect match for a boy who is wise beyond his years. And when tragedy strikes, she becomes a perfect foil for his father too.
Elliott will turn out to have a much more complicated family than first appears. And Sandra, hard on the surface, will turn out to have many more soft, nurturing instincts than she ever imagined. She seems to constantly surprise herself: when daycare teachers, hospital workers, and others see her with the child and ask who she is, she shrugs and simply says, “The neighbour.” None of this transformation comes in the cutely wrapped package you might expect from a Hollywood movie about the same subject matter.
Life—counted out cleverly here in the days, weeks, and then months since the birth of Lucille, the baby—is messy, and you’ll come to care for every one of the complex, contradictory characters, given natural, standout performances across the board. Pio Marmaï is a marvel as the father, Alex, a whirl of masculine posturing, his love of cooking surpassed only by his love for his children, all shot through with the bursts of rage and despair that come from grief.
Add the fact that all of L’Attachement was shot in a real Rennes apartment, with Elin Kirschfink’s intimate cinematography—including close-ups of pudgy baby fingers, cluttered apartment couches, and crayon drawings being shoved under doors—and you’ll feel increasingly “attached” to this ever-growing, ever-complicated found family. In fact, like Sandra, you may find yourself reassessing everything you feel about family ties and what’s important in life—long after the movie, unsentimental and unexpected to the end, is over. 
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