It all starts with a blast of blue light. A gloss caressing the cheeks of Camille (Pili Groyne), 16, four months pregnant and tossed around in a fire truck while she’s just been downing medication to attempt an abortion. This first scene serves as a prelude to the placement of the young woman in a mothers’ center against her will and that of her mother. And so the director gets involved in the daily lives of the women who populate this structure, which helps single mothers or mothers in difficulty. If, however, the idea of approaching the subject of those who have long been labeled “unmarried mothers” through the prism of maternal centers suggests scenes of a certain violence—between their emotional distress and their financial fragility—that is Julie Lerat’s forte – Gersant’s story lies in the soft gaze her camera gives her.
Touching naivety
An approach that manages to express at once the anger, the fear, the pain and the tenderness that drives them, without the trap of caricature and without shedding tears. Thus the story unfolds according to Camille’s emotions and the relationships she develops with the women at the centre. And the everyday scenes that spice up the speech mix with the teenage antics. Some passages seem a bit expected – Camille paints her nails with a black marker, drives at full speed and on rollerblades along the strikes of Caen and Cherbourg and dreams of a carelessness that soon flies away dancing in the rain – which nonetheless color the story with more touching Greenness. Likewise, the close-ups embrace the characters’ gaze to the point where they merge with their skin, adding a sensual dimension to the film.
complex relationship
One could lament the lack of a thread as the story flutters from one theme to another, dwelling alternately on the tears of a child left alone by a woman to dance and the relationship complex Camille harbors with her own mother. We might also regret the speed with which the film evacuates the treatment of certain characters, particularly that of Nadine (Romane Bohringer), Camille’s referent – and which nevertheless allows us to implicitly outline a critique of childhood welfare, necrotically dated Lack of staff to administrative inertia that hinders decision-making.
