Every day, AlloCiné recommends a film to (re)watch on TV. Tonight: the fight of a lifetime by Jeanne Herry.
Five years before hitting hard with I will always see your faces, a powerful feature film on restorative justice, Jeanne Herry created a touching film about the obstacle course of adoption.
Released in cinemas in 2018, Pupille is, as its title indicates, a drama about childbirth under X. The day of his birth, Théo is put up for adoption. The child welfare services and the adoption service quickly set about finding a new family for the newborn. The lucky lady is named Alice, 41 years old, and she has been fighting to become a single mother for ten years.
To embody on screen this woman with a painful life journey, Jeanne Herry has chosen a two-time César award-winning actress for her performance in Wild Reeds and The Dream Life of Angels: Élodie Bouchez. For the director with a thirty-year career, it was obvious, since she considers Elodie Bouchez as “an ideal double” of herself.
A bubble of love and tenderness
And to play the role of family assistant, Jeanne Herry turned to one of the most fashionable male figures in French cinema of the moment: Gilles Lellouche. “A slightly virile man, who embodied a tough masculinity in the cinema, it was the assurance of astonishment for me and the spectator, of a strong image” explained the filmmaker.
For the director of L'Amour ouf, this character was also a way of putting an end to the image of “macho” or “hetero-beauf” that we sometimes have the habit of sticking to him. And the least we can say is that this tender and loving role suits her perfectly, as does that of Sandrine Kiberlain, who plays a caring special educator.
The adoption process, and more precisely the period when the child is placed in the hands of family services, is a subject rarely discussed in cinema, according to Jeanne Herry. She confided: “I understood that the task of these social workers was to find parents for a baby, not to find a child for parents in need: it was a revelation.”
And this bubble of love present in this film touched the spectators' hearts. Moreover, AlloCiné Internet users gave it a very good rating of 4.2 out of 5, and 4.3 out of 5 for the press rating. With its touching actors and its adorable babies, the film Pupil moves, upsets and amazes.
Tonight on France 2 at 9:10 p.m.
