Cinema | A Little Bit of Sadness

It's unwatchable: a confirmed single (usually male) meets a cute child, is forced to grapple with him alone against his will, and their dislike turns into great love, which often entails a conversion to nuclear family life. Carine Tardieu now also employs this overused child-child schema from numerous feel-good movies, but thankfully modifies it at crucial points. Her unattached and self-confident protagonist Sandra, who passionately runs a feminist bookstore, reluctantly agrees to babysit her six-year-old neighbor Elliot (César Botti as a textbook smart aleck) for a few hours while his parents go to the hospital for his sister's birth. But then the father returns home without his wife or mother - only the baby survived the birth.

Oops! Does the film want to force a seasoned feminist, in her mid-50s, into the role of family mother?

Sandra sees the hardship of the grieving remaining family, is chosen and taken over by the charmingly precocious Elliot, and helps the widower hesitantly at first, then with increasing determination, which he responds to with advances – and at this point, at the latest, all the alarm bells start ringing as they watch: Is a seasoned feminist in her mid-50s supposed to be punished for her independent life and forced into the role of family mother?

Although her film isn't free of clichés, the director of French audience favorites ("A Breton Love") doesn't make things that easy for herself. Sandra is allowed to maintain her independence while still entering into a completely different, surprising relationship.

The Parisian director, she says, sees herself as a feminist, "inevitably," but not as an activist. "Politics appears a bit in my films, but conveying messages is not my primary concern; nevertheless, writing is a form of engagement." She has had to justify herself far too often for not living the traditional role model. When she decided to adopt a child at the age of 40, she experienced firsthand how bonding (the film is titled "L'Attachement" in the original) develops from intense contact. In this adaptation of Alice Ferney's novel "L'intimité," she had in mind the theory of British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, according to which children, out of their survival instinct, bond to the person who cares for them. "In short: necessity is the mother of invention." Precisely because Sandra doesn't play the role of substitute mother and talks to Elliot like an adult, he doesn't see her in competition with his mother and chooses her as a safe haven in a phase in which the ground is being pulled out from under him and his father.

Sandra's sister and mother act as opposing models in "What Connects Us," representing different female lifestyles. Nevertheless, the film trivializes and romanticizes both care work and grief. The everyday crises seem cushioned, and the children of the single widower develop splendidly. Divided into linear chapters, each titled with the newborn's age, the film otherwise remains straightforward and conventional. Only at the beginning does the camera adopt the child's perspective. The adults communicate important messages through closed glass doors, maintaining a residual distance.

It's striking that Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, usually known for playing nervous wrecks and "hysterics," performs well, composed, and reservedly in the role of the unconventional feminist. We've never seen her smile so silently before. The most daring thing the script allows her to do is her smoking habit—even when small children are in the room.

What Unites Us, France 2024. Directed by Carine Tardieu. Starring Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Pio Marmaï. 105 minutes. Release date: August 7.