Dual dramas “Mother And Son” and “The Sixth Child” premiere locally at the Wisconsin Film Festival on April 14, 15, and 18.
Among the diverse selections at this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival, two films stand out from Young French Cinema, a program that comes to the lineup via UniFrance (an organization that promotes French films around the world) and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. Mother And Son (2022)—screening Friday, April 14, at 3:30 p.m. and Tuesday, April 18, at 12:30 p.m. at Hilldale—and The Sixth Child (2022)—screening Saturday, April 15, at 11 a.m. and Tuesday, April 18, at 3 p.m. at Hilldale—explore many of the same themes: secrets, culture clashes, moral ambiguity, and the infinite complexities of the ties that bind us. In these powerful dramas, individuals on the fringes of French society struggle day by day to provide for their families, while desperately trying to do the right thing.
Unfolding over a period of 20 years, Léonor Serraille’s Mother And Son follows a single mother, Rose (Annabelle Lengronne), and her two young sons, Jean and Ernest (Stéphane Bak and Kenzo Sambin), who emigrate from the Ivory Coast to France in the late 1980s to carve out a new life. With a triptych structure and an exquisite eye for sensory detail, Serraille conveys their respective experiences through a series of vivid tableaux that capture fleeting impressions of reality and mood.
Gradually, Mother And Son reveals select information about its main characters as it depicts the kaleidoscopic events of Jean and Ernest’s upbringing. Serraille skillfully interweaves an intimate, richly textured family portrait with heavy themes of social alienation, immigration control, racial discrimination, postcolonial malaise, and transgenerational trauma. The film’s fluid, contemplative rhythms, unforgettable visual poetry, and fractured, elliptical narrative add up to an entrancing meditation on the value of family, the meaning of violence, and the elusive nature of happiness in contemporary urban society. Mother And Son also features an eclectic soundtrack with tunes ranging from J. S. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue No. 14, African folk music and French hostile hip hop, to the Belgian techno anthem “Pump Up the Jam.”
At once an intimate domestic drama, a gripping social thriller, and a gritty existential crime film, The Sixth Child tells the story of an inconceivable business transaction between two couples. Director and co-screenwriter Léopold Legrand’s debut feature meticulously observes the intersection of morality, religion, the law, class, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and emotions when two entirely different worlds collide.
Franck (Damien Bonnard) earns a livelihood selling scrap metal, but supplements this meager income with petty larceny. He resides in a trailer on a vacant lot on the outskirts of Paris with his wife Mériem (Judith Chemla) and their five children. Meanwhile, Julien (Benjamin Lavernhe) and Anna (Sara Giraudeau) share a comfortable bourgeois existence practicing law in Paris. While they appear to be content on the surface, their inability to conceive a child has left a void in their marriage.
The couples’ lives become intertwined when Franck acts as an accomplice in a theft of copper cables and subsequently wrecks his van in an automobile accident. In need of legal counsel and without a means of supporting his family, Franck consults Julien, who gets him off the hook and benevolently proposes a financial arrangement for his legal fees.
Franck soon discovers that Mériem has become pregnant again. Because they are devout Catholics, an abortion remains out of the question, and the destitute couple simply cannot afford another mouth to feed. Thus, the only viable alternative for Franck and Mériem is to abandon their titular sixth child. Hoping to grant his unborn baby a chance at a better life—and aware of Julien and Anna’s desire for a child—Franck appears unexpectedly at Julien’s office one day and makes an illegal business proposition. According to law, this exchange would qualify as human trafficking. In his capacity as a lawyer, Julien is only too cognizant of the risks involved in such a transaction and rejects Franck’s offer outright. But Anna’s deep longing for motherhood compels her to look at the deal from a different angle.
Loosely based on Alain Jaspard’s novel Pleurer des rivières (Crying Rivers), The Sixth Child unfolds with the kinetic rhythms of a thriller, while integrating several viewpoints, solutions, and degrees of complexity. The elliptical, intricately layered screenplay by Legrand and Catherine Paillé accentuates the moral ambiguities at the heart of the film, ramps up the dramatic tension, and encourages empathy for the four main characters. In an interview with Anne-Claire Cieutat included in a press kit for The Sixth Child, Legrand explains his approach to the narrative: “The film obviously deals with moral and legal issues, but I wanted to focus on the personal, more intimate side of things instead. […] I have tried to tell of their secrets, doubts and hopes, without being opinionated nor judgmental. My goal was simply to understand them, and to love them.”
Like Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker (2022), another recent film about human trafficking, The Sixth Child takes a potentially grim premise and develops it into a profound meditation on the meaning of family in an increasingly complicated modern world. Legrand presents a nuanced, sensitive, and gently audacious treatment of a controversial subject, while neither romanticizing human trafficking nor explicitly condemning the “crime” the two couples are contemplating. The Sixth Child subtly juxtaposes naturalistic cinematography, lifelike textures, and vividly three-dimensional characters with stylized compositions and artificially heightened sound design, all resulting in a cinematic experience that may subvert what viewers are expecting.
Fulfilling Young French Cinema’s generous mission to “bring French films with no US distribution to art house cinemas, film societies […] and American universities,” Mother And Son and The Sixth Child illuminate something poignantly human in their protagonists’ efforts to find solace and meaning in a harsh modern world, while also daring to envision a brighter future for their children.
