(Spoiler alert)
A film couldn’t have a happier opening image than a pregnant woman sitting on a bench, protectively stroking her belly. We’ll circle back to what happiness is in the last scene, but especially at the beginning of MY ZOE, cameraman Stéphane Fontaine’s (JACKIE; ELLE) pleasantly restrained cinematography doesn’t let us rest there, quickly hinting at the fact that bliss is fleeting, fragile, ephemeral. In blurry images and through unobtrusive tableaus of a family breakfast table, a child’s bed-time, the normal, comfortable routine of middle-aged French-American Isabelle is established. We see her take her bright, multilingual 7-year-old daughter Zoe to school in the heart of Berlin; we follow Isabelle on her way to her work as a medical researcher, negotiating custody arrangements with her estranged British husband James over the phone. Stress, fun, responsibility, juggling soccer practice and zoo visits, the usual elements of modern patchwork family life.
Oscar-nominated writer-director-actor Julie Delpy (BEFORE SUNSET) gives a no holds barred performance of this mother, full of effusive love and the accompanying self-doubt and anxiety, whose world is rocked when something happens to “her Zoe." In the Q&A at the TIFF19 world premiere, Delpy explained that the film was decades in the making and took its beginning with a conversation with her then-director Krzysztof Kieślowski on fate, family and loss.
Richard Armitage (still somewhat on home turf in Berlin through BERLIN STATION) is Isabelle’s ex-husband, seemingly hard, angry, unforgiving, even spiteful.
The couple give new meaning to “irreconcilable differences,” bickering, hissing suspicions and accusations. Just when you decide to dislike James and take sides in the war of roses, Armitage lets us in on another part of James, hints at another side of the couple’s discordant history, adding tender vulnerability, deep hurt, and an understandable longing for his lost family. By letting their former love shine through, the tension between the two adults becomes plausible and all the more mournful. It is rare in a film to be able to relate to all characters in their full human complexity —vanity, jealousy, egotism, and all— , but Delpy’s focussed writing and direction and the cast's nuanced skills make it so. Armitage was at TIFF16 in a similar role with BRAIN ON FIRE, but outdoes himself here, gradually deteriorating and disintegrating alongside Isabelle’s intense desperation and determination.
The challenges of parenting loom large at TIFF and other festivals this year (perhaps a sign of a global cohort of established middle-aged filmmakers), from Cannes thriller PARASITE to sci-fi drama PROXIMA --with a similar set-up of estranged scientist co-parents of a young daughter struggling with tough decisions-- to Angela Schanelec’s relentless I WAS AT HOME BUT, Katrin Gebbe’s adoption drama PELICAN BLOOD (both at TIFF) and Germany’s Berlinale-winning Oscar entry SYSTEM CRASHER. TIFF rightly put MY ZOE into its exciting Platform section of strong and boundary-pushing directorial voices.
Delpy’s seventh film, and unlike all her others I’ve seen, stands out in going well beyond the same old dysfunctional family plot and seeing its moral and ethical conundrums through to the bitter-sweet end. When every parent’s nightmare happens, Isabelle and James have no family left to share the pain, no relationship left to comfort each other or conjure up much compassion outside of their own respective grief. Brief moments of attempted rapprochement falter, dragged down by the maelstrom of tragedy. Why is there no word for a parent who lost their child, wonders Isabelle. Her own mother is the opposite of helpful, so both parents are left alone, together. No melodrama, no music. Delpy simply shows and we follow her. It is that personal lens that makes the story so gut-wrenching and compelling. One could argue that the film is more about the first than the second word in the title (and I think Delpy knows that), but again, Fontaine's camera helps to gently steer us away from any myopia, flitting onto the faces of other people, suffering or anxious for loved ones, in the hospital's hallway. Pain and death are common, human. What is uncommon is Isabelle’s radical rejection to accept that fate. She is so far gone in her pain that anything becomes thinkable, any boundary transgressible. Greek myths from Orpheus to Baucis and Philemon come to mind. “What kind of life will she have?” asks the doctor who cares for Zoe at the end. The question applies to Isabelle and James as well.
Then the first twist (to put it mildly) confirms that we are in a near-future where Isabelle will make her own fate. Some advanced tech gadgets were giving us pointers before; but that doesn’t matter, what counts is that we are always in Isabelle’s present. Daniel Bruehl and Gemma Arterton come into play as a geneticist and his wife, who lead us to yet another twist — that one a bit harder to follow, but follow we will throughout three acts that could be three entire films.
Guilt, blame, emotional damage, eternal hope, the basic questions of the right to life, death, individuality, fatherhood, motherhood, nature and nurture are all woven into the dense script but do not weigh the film down. What could have been a didactic quagmire or morality play is instead a beautifully lucid, strangely conclusive, utterly non-judgmental exploration of parenthood, family-making, and choosing happiness that leaves you stunned and pensive.
Delpy puts her story in front of you and leaves it there. I thought I had an informed (and tested) standpoint on many of these questions, but the ending (not the outcome) left me shaken.
(
German trailer)
by
Jutta Brendemühl
image: Julie Delpy and Richard Armitage in conversation with Brad Deane at TIFF19 c Jutta Brendemühl
