别人的孩子是由丽贝卡·兹罗托斯基执导的一部拍摄于2022年剧情,喜剧片在法国上映，主演由维尔日妮·埃菲拉,罗什迪·泽姆,雅米·库卓,齐雅拉·马斯楚安尼,米雷耶·佩里耶,塞巴斯蒂安·普德鲁,弗雷德里克·怀斯曼,Victor,Lefebvre,Antonia,Buresi,Henri-Noël,Tabary领衔。 Rachel a 40 ans, pas d'enfant. Elle aime sa vie : ses élèves du lycée, ses amis, ses ex, ses cours de guitare. En tombant amoureuse d’Ali, elle s’attache à Leila, sa fille de 4 ans. Elle la borde, la soigne, et l’aime comme la sienne. Mais aimer les enfants des autres, c’est un risque à prendre
Zlotowski, a Jewish French filmmaker of the fairer sex, is what the French call a normalienne. She attended the École Normale Supérieure (one of the most prestigious "Grandes Écoles" in France) and secured an agrégation in modern literature - a competitive teaching qualification that effectively makes her an elite scholar of words.
In OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN, her 5th feature, Zlotowski concocts an affirmative act of empathy by centering a character usually relegated to the margins of cinema: the stepmother. Efira plays Rachel, a 40-something teacher who has reached that particular age where society starts asking uncomfortable questions about women without children. She is competent in her job. She has a loving family. She has a reasonably functional romantic life. What she doesn't have is a biological child, and the film refuses to make this either a tragedy or a triumph - it just... is.
Rachel and Ali (Zem), an industrial designer and divorcé of Arabic extraction with an adorable four-year-old daughter Leila (Ferreira-Goncalves), meet cute. She soon becomes almost a permanent fixture in a family that existed long before she arrived - Leila's mother Alice (a gracious turn by Mastroianni) shares the coparenting duty with Ali - and is almost at peace with the fact that she will never have her own child. So Rachel has to figure out what it means to love someone else's child when she has no official standing, no biological claim, and no guarantee that this won't all disappear tomorrow. Also Alice apparently holds no grudge towards her and their exchanges betray a tacit understanding of their mutual respect and guardedness.
The film’s tension arises entirely from the fragility of Rachel’s position; she is a woman whose heart is fully invested in a temporary contract. It represents "sociological chic" at its finest, blending the intellectual rigor of a French academic paper with the sensuality of a summer afternoon (Rachel and Ali's union inarticulately underlies a presentable union between Jewism and Islam). There is a specific scene where Rachel is told by her family gynecologist - played by the late legendary documentarian Wiseman (who also has a cameo in A PRIVATE LIFE) in a stroke of meta-casting genius - that her time is running out. Most directors would play this for melodrama, yet Zlotowski arranges it as a cold, hard fact of physics. It is the radiation leak of the soul; a silent, invisible change that alters the chemistry of everything that follows. Rachel’s journey is one of refined survival, a realization that the "other people" in the title are both the source of her greatest joy and the architects of her inevitable displacement.
In the center, Efira has one of those rare instruments that can register longing, joy, resignation, and hope in the same expression. Her eyes do the work that lesser actors would need monologues to accomplish. Even in Rachel's broodiest moment, she holds her ends up in a dignified poise, not giving in to sentimentality. Zem is charming enough, but the film is so pivoted on Rachel's interiority that his Ali never quite becomes a full person. He's more of a catalyst than a character - the thing that happens to Rachel rather than someone with his own complicated inner life, to say nothing of that he looks far too long-in-the-tooth to beget a 5-year-older. As Leila, Ferreira-Goncalves is affectionate without being cloying, demanding without being bratty, completely believable as someone worth rearranging your life for. When Rachel falls for her, we can commune with her wholeheartedly.
In the end, Rachel isn't looking for a new family to join or a new man to validate her. She has accepted that she is the protagonist of her own life, even if that life looks "incomplete" by traditional standards. It’s Zlotowski's buoyant rebellion against the idea that a woman is only "finished" when she’s a mother. Before that, a chance encounter with Dylan (Lefebvre), her former struggling student who is now a successful waiter, is the film's true climax. It signifies that Rachel’s maternal instinct wasn't "wasted" just because she lost Leila or didn't conceive. By showing that she fundamentally changed the trajectory of a child she didn't birth, the film argues that motherhood is a verb, not a legal status. It suggests that the "children of others" are, in a societal sense, also hers.
3 years after, Zlotowski dishes up the follow-up A PRIVATE LIFE, transporting audience to the velvet, deceptive shadows in the Parisian residence of Lilian Steine (Foster), an American shrink. Her life is orderly. Her patients are manageable. Her ex-husband Gabriel (Auteuil) is amiably present from a safe distance, always at her beck and call. Then a patient dies. Then another patient fires her. Then she gets thrown out of a funeral. Then she starts to secrete tears involuntarily. Then she becomes convinced that the dead patient - Paula (Efira) was murdered, and she is inexplicably compelled to solve the case (they might be lovers in their past lives according to an induced hypnotic experience). The suspect ranges from Paula's daughter Valérie (Bajrami) to her husband Simon (Amalric). Yet the film operates on a double frequency: it is a colorable murder mystery, but also a psychological autopsy of Lilian's life, whose undertow is signified by the strained relation with her son Julien (Lacoste).
Thus, Lilian drags Gabriel into increasingly absurd investigations. She dabbles in hypnosis (there is an amusing the-pot-calling-the-kettle-black irony watching depth psychology belittle hypnosis). She has dreams that may or may not be past-life regressions (which is specifically set during WWII, and like Rachel, Lilian is Jewish, lapsed though). She becomes obsessed with a case that everyone else has dismissed, and the film mischievously teases us whether she's brilliantly perceptive or completely losing it.
Zlotowski throws multiple genres into a blender and hits puree: mystery, comedy, psychological thriller, surrealist dreamscape, crime investigation, you name it. A priori, It shouldn't work. However the film's providential disobedience to sit still actually becomes its asset - just when you think you've figured out what you're watching, it shape-shifts into something else. That said, the actual solving of the case feels almost incidental and its dissolving into a reverie of Nazi-era assassination in an orchestra has great promise, but fizzles out quickly as a throwaway reminder of Zlotowski's own Jewish origin, in tandem with an undercooked queer energy between Foster and Efira (a big misstep on Zlotowski's side for she mananges to lure Foster into a francophone project but settles her for largely unremarkable characterizations: a difficult mother, an absent-minded professional, a conceited intellectual: all the usual Gallic properties).
Speaking French with a precision that feels both lived-in and weaponized (while English is mostly uttered for curses's sake), Foster anchors the movie’s tonal gymnastics - swinging from Hitchcockian dread (not without a whiff of hokeyness in design) to "divorced-and-dangerous" screwball comedy - with a signature, lethal dryness. Watching her "sleuth" alongside Auteuil is like watching a master clockmaker try to fix a toaster. She makes the "investigative shrink" trope feel less like a cliché and more like a curated, auburn-tinted vibe.
Auteuil's Gabriel functions both as audience surrogate and comic relief, the one person in Lilian's orbit who recognizes that she's spiraling but can't quite stop watching. Their scenes together have the comfortable rhythm of people who know each other's worst qualities and have mostly made peace with them. Contrariwise, Amalric provides the film’s much-needed emotional friction. In a narrative that often feels like a polished, high-concept puzzle, his Simon is the piece that sticks out like a sore thumb, and he’s all the better for it. He transforms what could have been a standard "neurotic Frenchman" archetype into something that feels dangerously unpredictable and desperately sad.
Here the camerawork becomes an observer of patterns - spiral staircases, the sharp geometry of Lilian's office-cum-domicile, the rhythmic flickering of a hypnotic light. The film flags up that Lilian is so used to hearing confessions that she has lost astuteness in her métier, and by extension, psychoanalysis as a therapeutic means has lost its efficacy. Hence, Paula's demise could've been preempted were it not for Lilian's self-regarding woolgathering and occupational burnout.
Irrefragably an intellectual, Zlotowski’s talent lies in her ability to make the intellectual feel erotic. In A PRIVATE LIFE, a scene of clinical hypnosis is directed with the same pulsing intensity as a high-speed car chase in a Hollywood blockbuster. She uses sound - often collaborating with the composer Robin Coudert aka. ROB - to create a synth-heavy, atmospheric heartbeat that prevents her films from ever feeling like "stiff" bourgeois dramas. The music in both films acts as the "inner weather" of the characters, a low-frequency hum of anxiety that reminds us that beneath the chic coats and the sophisticated dialogue, these women are vibrating with the effort of holding themselves together.
Above all, Zlotowski made two very different films about two very different women. Both have arrived somewhere unexpected. Both have learned that the people we acquaint or love - whether they're children or patients or ex-husbands or strangers - remain fundamentally other, fundamentally separate, fundamentally not ours to control.
referential entries: Justine Triet’s SIBYL (2019, 6.8/10); Nicolas Bedos’s LA BELLE ÉPOQUE (2019, 6.7/10).
Zlotowski, a Jewish French filmmaker of the fairer sex, is what the French call a normalienne. She attended the École Normale Supérieure (one of the most prestigious "Grandes Écoles" in France) and secured an agrégation in modern literature - a competitive teaching qualification that effectively makes her an elite scholar of words.
In OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN, her 5th feature, Zlotowski concocts an affirmative act of empathy by centering a character usually relegated to the margins of cinema: the stepmother. Efira plays Rachel, a 40-something teacher who has reached that particular age where society starts asking uncomfortable questions about women without children. She is competent in her job. She has a loving family. She has a reasonably functional romantic life. What she doesn't have is a biological child, and the film refuses to make this either a tragedy or a triumph - it just... is.
Rachel and Ali (Zem), an industrial designer and divorcé of Arabic extraction with an adorable four-year-old daughter Leila (Ferreira-Goncalves), meet cute. She soon becomes almost a permanent fixture in a family that existed long before she arrived - Leila's mother Alice (a gracious turn by Mastroianni) shares the coparenting duty with Ali - and is almost at peace with the fact that she will never have her own child. So Rachel has to figure out what it means to love someone else's child when she has no official standing, no biological claim, and no guarantee that this won't all disappear tomorrow. Also Alice apparently holds no grudge towards her and their exchanges betray a tacit understanding of their mutual respect and guardedness.
The film’s tension arises entirely from the fragility of Rachel’s position; she is a woman whose heart is fully invested in a temporary contract. It represents "sociological chic" at its finest, blending the intellectual rigor of a French academic paper with the sensuality of a summer afternoon (Rachel and Ali's union inarticulately underlies a presentable union between Jewism and Islam). There is a specific scene where Rachel is told by her family gynecologist - played by the late legendary documentarian Wiseman (who also has a cameo in A PRIVATE LIFE) in a stroke of meta-casting genius - that her time is running out. Most directors would play this for melodrama, yet Zlotowski arranges it as a cold, hard fact of physics. It is the radiation leak of the soul; a silent, invisible change that alters the chemistry of everything that follows. Rachel’s journey is one of refined survival, a realization that the "other people" in the title are both the source of her greatest joy and the architects of her inevitable displacement.
In the center, Efira has one of those rare instruments that can register longing, joy, resignation, and hope in the same expression. Her eyes do the work that lesser actors would need monologues to accomplish. Even in Rachel's broodiest moment, she holds her ends up in a dignified poise, not giving in to sentimentality. Zem is charming enough, but the film is so pivoted on Rachel's interiority that his Ali never quite becomes a full person. He's more of a catalyst than a character - the thing that happens to Rachel rather than someone with his own complicated inner life, to say nothing of that he looks far too long-in-the-tooth to beget a 5-year-older. As Leila, Ferreira-Goncalves is affectionate without being cloying, demanding without being bratty, completely believable as someone worth rearranging your life for. When Rachel falls for her, we can commune with her wholeheartedly.
In the end, Rachel isn't looking for a new family to join or a new man to validate her. She has accepted that she is the protagonist of her own life, even if that life looks "incomplete" by traditional standards. It’s Zlotowski's buoyant rebellion against the idea that a woman is only "finished" when she’s a mother. Before that, a chance encounter with Dylan (Lefebvre), her former struggling student who is now a successful waiter, is the film's true climax. It signifies that Rachel’s maternal instinct wasn't "wasted" just because she lost Leila or didn't conceive. By showing that she fundamentally changed the trajectory of a child she didn't birth, the film argues that motherhood is a verb, not a legal status. It suggests that the "children of others" are, in a societal sense, also hers.
3 years after, Zlotowski dishes up the follow-up A PRIVATE LIFE, transporting audience to the velvet, deceptive shadows in the Parisian residence of Lilian Steine (Foster), an American shrink. Her life is orderly. Her patients are manageable. Her ex-husband Gabriel (Auteuil) is amiably present from a safe distance, always at her beck and call. Then a patient dies. Then another patient fires her. Then she gets thrown out of a funeral. Then she starts to secrete tears involuntarily. Then she becomes convinced that the dead patient - Paula (Efira) was murdered, and she is inexplicably compelled to solve the case (they might be lovers in their past lives according to an induced hypnotic experience). The suspect ranges from Paula's daughter Valérie (Bajrami) to her husband Simon (Amalric). Yet the film operates on a double frequency: it is a colorable murder mystery, but also a psychological autopsy of Lilian's life, whose undertow is signified by the strained relation with her son Julien (Lacoste).
Thus, Lilian drags Gabriel into increasingly absurd investigations. She dabbles in hypnosis (there is an amusing the-pot-calling-the-kettle-black irony watching depth psychology belittle hypnosis). She has dreams that may or may not be past-life regressions (which is specifically set during WWII, and like Rachel, Lilian is Jewish, lapsed though). She becomes obsessed with a case that everyone else has dismissed, and the film mischievously teases us whether she's brilliantly perceptive or completely losing it.
Zlotowski throws multiple genres into a blender and hits puree: mystery, comedy, psychological thriller, surrealist dreamscape, crime investigation, you name it. A priori, It shouldn't work. However the film's providential disobedience to sit still actually becomes its asset - just when you think you've figured out what you're watching, it shape-shifts into something else. That said, the actual solving of the case feels almost incidental and its dissolving into a reverie of Nazi-era assassination in an orchestra has great promise, but fizzles out quickly as a throwaway reminder of Zlotowski's own Jewish origin, in tandem with an undercooked queer energy between Foster and Efira (a big misstep on Zlotowski's side for she mananges to lure Foster into a francophone project but settles her for largely unremarkable characterizations: a difficult mother, an absent-minded professional, a conceited intellectual: all the usual Gallic properties).
Speaking French with a precision that feels both lived-in and weaponized (while English is mostly uttered for curses's sake), Foster anchors the movie’s tonal gymnastics - swinging from Hitchcockian dread (not without a whiff of hokeyness in design) to "divorced-and-dangerous" screwball comedy - with a signature, lethal dryness. Watching her "sleuth" alongside Auteuil is like watching a master clockmaker try to fix a toaster. She makes the "investigative shrink" trope feel less like a cliché and more like a curated, auburn-tinted vibe.
Auteuil's Gabriel functions both as audience surrogate and comic relief, the one person in Lilian's orbit who recognizes that she's spiraling but can't quite stop watching. Their scenes together have the comfortable rhythm of people who know each other's worst qualities and have mostly made peace with them. Contrariwise, Amalric provides the film’s much-needed emotional friction. In a narrative that often feels like a polished, high-concept puzzle, his Simon is the piece that sticks out like a sore thumb, and he’s all the better for it. He transforms what could have been a standard "neurotic Frenchman" archetype into something that feels dangerously unpredictable and desperately sad.
Here the camerawork becomes an observer of patterns - spiral staircases, the sharp geometry of Lilian's office-cum-domicile, the rhythmic flickering of a hypnotic light. The film flags up that Lilian is so used to hearing confessions that she has lost astuteness in her métier, and by extension, psychoanalysis as a therapeutic means has lost its efficacy. Hence, Paula's demise could've been preempted were it not for Lilian's self-regarding woolgathering and occupational burnout.
Irrefragably an intellectual, Zlotowski’s talent lies in her ability to make the intellectual feel erotic. In A PRIVATE LIFE, a scene of clinical hypnosis is directed with the same pulsing intensity as a high-speed car chase in a Hollywood blockbuster. She uses sound - often collaborating with the composer Robin Coudert aka. ROB - to create a synth-heavy, atmospheric heartbeat that prevents her films from ever feeling like "stiff" bourgeois dramas. The music in both films acts as the "inner weather" of the characters, a low-frequency hum of anxiety that reminds us that beneath the chic coats and the sophisticated dialogue, these women are vibrating with the effort of holding themselves together.
Above all, Zlotowski made two very different films about two very different women. Both have arrived somewhere unexpected. Both have learned that the people we acquaint or love - whether they're children or patients or ex-husbands or strangers - remain fundamentally other, fundamentally separate, fundamentally not ours to control.
referential entries: Justine Triet’s SIBYL (2019, 6.8/10); Nicolas Bedos’s LA BELLE ÉPOQUE (2019, 6.7/10).
小时候我妈偶尔把我扔别人家玩儿，有个阿姨我记得很清楚，她给她女儿编了漂亮的双马尾，选头绳什么的花了很长时间，到我这儿，就敷衍地扎了一下。这事儿要说起来简直就是理所应当，哪个妈妈会在别人家孩子身上花心思？我那时候就会对那些能尽量把我和她们自己家孩子平等对待的阿姨看得很高大，觉得她们闪烁着超越人性的光芒。
我在自己家也是这样被偏爱着，当我喜欢一个人，全家都夸那个人，当我讨厌一个人，全家都会跟着骂TA，这让我一度觉得无论我做什么家人都是我的坚强后盾，我很幸运。
一旦这个逻辑站稳脚跟，我自己做妈了就更加护崽儿，娃儿在学校被批评了，被同学欺负了，我觉得自己该做的就是挡在他前面，为他扛下所有，我把自己设计成一个永远给予孩子支持的妈妈，并为此深深感动，直到有天被娃儿骂醒。他对我说：“妈妈，我现在学校有什么事儿都不敢跟你说了，因为你总是过分紧张，把我和朋友的关系搞得更糟了！”
从那天起我开始思考一个问题，当妈就是做人，做公平的妈比做对自家孩子有偏爱的妈更能教孩子做人。换句话说，一个女人，如果你看到她能很好地对待别人的孩子，她一定也教得好自己的孩子，就像本片女主一样。
接下去要思考的是过度的爱和支持真的不可取吗？给孩子“无论我做什么妈妈都永远支持我”的信念是错误的吗？我觉得答案是肯定的。当孩子真心认同“无论我做什么妈妈都永远支持我”，你得当心自己会培养出一个永远长不大的巨婴或者一个永远以自我为中心的自恋狂。
“具体问题具体分析，娃儿做的事儿有些可以支持有些不能支持”，这才是教会孩子正确处理人际关系，评价是非对错的办法。同理，当娃儿和小伙伴发生争执，不偏袒我娃儿，要不让他们自己解决，实在有必要帮忙，我得是那个公正的法官，尤其要让自己的孩子看到这点，妈妈不会因为他是自己的孩子就向着他，妈妈会尽量公平地这样处理这件矛盾，站在这样的立场上才能养出三观正确，健康人格的孩子。
那么那些抱着“无论孩子做什么我都要永远支持他”想法的家长其实是在做什么呢？很明显他们是在溺爱孩子，溺爱等于控制，当孩子心中认同了“无论我做什么妈妈都永远支持我”，孩子就很难和这类家长分开了，一分开就会严重内疚和自责（因为他们是永远支持我的家长啊，我怎么能背叛他们呢）。但是，孩子们认为的永远支持我的妈妈其实是教不会你正确处理问题的妈妈，也是潜意识里想用这种方法捆绑住你，不愿让你高飞的妈妈。