A
version of this review appeared in The Age,
July 5, 2012.
If
nothing else, Remi Bezançon's twee look at the before-and-after of
childbirth offers a lesson on the cultural differences between
French cinema and Hollywood. The heroine Barbara (Louise Bourgoin)
is a philosophy student who spends the movie working on her thesis,
even as personal experience gives her a whole new perspective on the
fraught connection between Self and Other. “My life was no longer
mine. I was a void, a chasm, a nothing...” That's not the
kind of voiceover commentary we were ever going to hear in Judd
Apatow's Knocked Up.
Like
Katherine Heigl's character in the Apatow film, Barbara is a testy
beauty whose life-plan is derailed when she falls pregnant. In her
case, this happens shortly after she gets together with her boyfriend
Nicolas (Pio Marmaï) – who thankfully looks nothing like Seth
Rogen, even if he does work in a video store and enjoy Star Trek.
Before they can care for a child successfully the pair have to grow
up themselves, which means addressing the problems they have with
their own parents.
The
film is more relaxed about sex than most of its American equivalents,
and is also reasonably frank about the less frequently raised topic
of how post-natal depression can threaten a relationship. But for the
most part this is the usual kind of dreary commercial French comedy –
a sea of whimsical montage and fantasy sequences, pseudo-dramatic
confrontations, and jokes designed to congratulate the audience on
their knowledge of culture high and low.
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