Apparently decided to show herself francophone cinema’s most inexhaustible treasured useful resource, Virginie Efira as soon as once more lights up the display screen previous to burning it down in a job that, after Justine Triet’s “Sibyl,” Paul Verhoeven’s “Benedetta” and Rebecca Zlotowski’s “Other People’s Children,” is of a kind she has come to outline: the strong-willed, good fortysomething girl chafing towards her society’s conformist expectations. Delphine Deloget’s debut “All to Play For” options one among Efira’s extra easy incarnations of this dramatic sort — fewer sly kinks, no arch winks. But she is not any much less riveting and beautiful for it and in Deloget’s assured, light grip, she turns in one among her most dedicated performances, all of the extra shifting for its dedication to valorizing the form of girl seldom handled on display screen with such respect and compassion.
The girl is Sylvie, launched to us whereas mid-shift at her job in a busy Brest nightclub venue on a usually chaotic, sweaty night time. Liquid sprays from a busted beer line; a girl passes out within the crush; somebody has introduced, then deserted, a stay hen. Harried however good-humored, Sylvie wraps the faucet, deposits the lady on a settee within the cluttered backstage inexperienced room, and shoos the hen in after her. This swift, no-nonsense girl’s job could also be bartender, however in between serving drinks and shrugging off the flirtations of drunken regulars, it’s already clear that she’s an all-round, equal-opportunities caregiver too. She’s the kind of girl who will take care of her troubled, seizure-prone brother Hervé (Arieh Worthalter) every time he’s on the town, and who will babysit for a neighbor even when doing so robs her of the possibility for a much-needed nap.
But holding a lot collectively, one thing’s acquired to provide. On this night time, it occurs when Sylvie’s youthful son Sofiane (Alexis Tonetti), left momentarily dwelling alone, decides to make some fries and units the kitchen range on hearth. His teenaged brother Jean-Jacques (Félix Lefebvre) returns in time to hurry Sofiane to the hospital in a procuring cart to deal with his minor burns, so when Sylvie arrives in a panic, he’s extra shaken than wounded. She gently rebukes Jean-Jacques, a accountable boy on whom she clearly depends to choose up some parenting slack, for being late dwelling. But in the meanwhile, within the flustered, seriocomic tone Deloget has established, her greatest concern is the ruined kitchen and the burnt-out range that she will transfer simply sufficient to get it irretrievably wedged within the doorway.
So it’s out of the blue when, a while later — after the kitchen’s been repainted and buddies have been spherical and Sylvie has made an abortive try and eliminate the hen which Sofiane has adopted as a pet — little one protecting companies present up at her door. Represented by Mlle Henry (India Hair), an ideal dagger of prim ethical superiority sheathed within the scabbard of impersonal paperwork, they’re deaf to Sylvie’s explanations, and take a terrified Sofiane away, on the empty promise that it’s a brief measure.
Everything in Deloget’s dynamic script, in Efira’s tough-cookie attraction, within the effortlessly loving, eccentric chemistry she has together with her youngsters and in Guillaume Schiffman’s heat, cellular, sympathetic camerawork cues us to grasp what a travesty of state overreach that is. And as an more and more determined Sylvie tries her hardest to change into the mom and girl they need her to be — getting a grim call-center job, enduring restricted, supervised visits, and attending a help group for folks in related circumstances, all of whom appear already defeated by the system — a special form of heartbreak happens. Sylvie is not any saint, however her flaws of sizzling mood, outspokenness and stubbornness are solid in the identical inside fires as her virtues. And to look at these flames die again progressively is a wrenching course of. When a late scene culminates in a dramatically sudden head-butt, despite the fact that you realize the results will likely be catastrophic, it’s by some means deeply cathartic: Sylvie remains to be alive in there someplace.
You can form of see what they had been going for once they translated the French title “Rien à perdre” (actually “Nothing to Lose”) to the English “All to Play For.” But “Nothing to Lose” captures rather more carefully the sheer maddening frustration of Sylvie’s state of affairs, and makes much better sense of her later selections. With her brisk, insightful, shifting first movie, Deloget has carried out greater than depart a calling-card. She has created, in tandem together with her very good star, a vigorous train in empathy and a remarkably soulful tribute to all of the robust, succesful however unconventional moms on the market, who ask little of the world, besides to be allowed to boost their youngsters as solely they’ll, with any lack of consideration to the letter of parenting legislation made up for by an abundance of idiosyncratic love.