Are the babies in the film Pupille real?

This Sunday, November 17, 2024 at 9:10 p.m., France 2 broadcasts the film Pupil by director Jeanne Herry, released in cinemas in December 2018. In this drama, for the purposes of certain scenes with babies a deception was found.

Pupil by Jeanne Herry with Elodie Bouchez, Sandrine Kiberlain and Gilles Lellouche, released in 2018, sensitively addresses the difficulty of adoption (which actress Ingrid Chauvin spoke about in 2020), and in particular the obstacle course faced by single mothers candidates for adoption in France. This evening, France 2 is broadcasting in the first part of the evening, from 9:10 p.m., this feature film which marked the return of Elodie Bouchez, who has been largely absent from the cinema in recent years.

Babies, docile actors

For his second film, after She adores himJeanne Herry, the daughter of Miou-Miou and Julien Clerc, recounts the first weeks of life of a baby abandoned at birth by his mother and for whom social services must find parents. Infants are at the heart of this fiction. But if child labor is highly regulated in cinema, it is even more so for babies. The controls and obligations are extremely important, forcing productions to use different babies for the same role. The filming of Pupil was no exception to the rule, a very large casting call was organized to find the newborns corresponding to the profile. As hazards are often present during filming with children and newborns, it would seem that the little ones selected for Pupil were wise. Elodie Bouchez confided in an interview that the baby she was filming with was rather easy. He was also not stingy with warbling during the takes, encroaching on his lines.

Pupil : The trick found to protect baby actors

There are many shots with babies in Pupil. To respect their working hours but above all to protect them emotionally, the director did not want to have real infants in certain scenes. “As it is a film which depicts the receptivity of babies to verbal language, there was no question of taking risks, of putting them in […] scenes where they would have heard 'your mother didn't want you', etc.” had explained Jeanne Herry. To protect them, the director therefore resorted to trickery: these are plastic babies who were used in the scenes considered the most sensitive. Be careful, you don't have much time left for the watch on Netflix!