Apparently determined to prove herself francophone cinema’s most inexhaustible precious resource, Virginie Efira once again lights up the screen prior to burning it down in a role that, after Justine Triet’s “Sibyl,” Paul Verhoeven’s “Benedetta” and Rebecca Zlotowski’s “Other People’s Children,” is of a type she has come to define: the strong-willed, smart fortysomething woman chafing against her society’s conformist expectations. Delphine Deloget’s debut “All to Play For” features one of Efira’s more straightforward incarnations of this dramatic type — fewer sly kinks, no arch winks. But she is no less riveting and lovely for it and in Deloget’s confident, gentle grip, she turns in one of her most committed performances, all the more moving for its commitment to valorizing the kind of woman seldom treated on screen with such respect and compassion.
The woman is Sylvie, introduced to us while mid-shift at her job in a busy Brest nightclub venue on a typically chaotic, sweaty night. Liquid sprays from a busted beer line; a woman passes out in the crush; someone has brought, then abandoned, a live chicken. Harried but good-humored, Sylvie wraps the tap, deposits the woman on a sofa in the cluttered backstage green room, and shoos the chicken in after her. This swift, no-nonsense woman’s job may be bartender, but 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 type of woman who will look after her troubled, seizure-prone brother Hervé (Arieh Worthalter) whenever he’s in town, and who will babysit for a neighbor even when doing so robs her of the chance for a much-needed nap.
But holding so much together, something’s got to give. On this night, it happens when Sylvie’s younger son Sofiane (Alexis Tonetti), left momentarily home alone, decides to make some fries and sets the kitchen stove on fire. His teenaged brother Jean-Jacques (Félix Lefebvre) returns in time to rush Sofiane to the hospital in a shopping cart to treat his minor burns, so when Sylvie arrives in a panic, he is more shaken than wounded. She gently rebukes Jean-Jacques, a responsible boy on whom she clearly relies to pick up some parenting slack, for being late home. But for the time being, in the flustered, seriocomic tone Deloget has established, her biggest concern is the ruined kitchen and the burnt-out stove that she can move just enough to get it irretrievably wedged in the doorway.
So it’s out of the blue when, some time later — after the kitchen’s been repainted and friends have been round and Sylvie has made an abortive attempt to get rid of the chicken which Sofiane has adopted as a pet — child protective services show up at her door. Represented by Mlle Henry (India Hair), a perfect dagger of prim moral superiority sheathed in the scabbard of impersonal bureaucracy, they are deaf to Sylvie’s explanations, and take a terrified Sofiane away, on the empty promise that it’s a temporary measure.
Everything in Deloget’s dynamic script, in Efira’s tough-cookie charm, in the effortlessly loving, eccentric chemistry she has with her kids and in Guillaume Schiffman’s warm, mobile, sympathetic camerawork cues us to understand what a travesty of state overreach this is. And as an increasingly desperate Sylvie tries her hardest to become the mother and woman they want her to be — getting a grim call-center job, enduring limited, supervised visits, and attending a support group for parents in similar circumstances, all of whom seem already defeated by the system — a different kind of heartbreak occurs. Sylvie is no saint, but her flaws of hot temper, outspokenness and stubbornness are forged in the same inner fires as her virtues. And to watch those flames die back progressively is a wrenching process. When a late scene culminates in a dramatically sudden head-butt, even though you know the consequences will be catastrophic, it is somehow deeply cathartic: Sylvie is still alive in there somewhere.
You can kind of see what they were going for when they translated the French title “Rien à perdre” (literally “Nothing to Lose”) to the English “All to Play For.” But “Nothing to Lose” captures much more closely the sheer maddening frustration of Sylvie’s situation, and makes far better sense of her later decisions. With her brisk, insightful, moving first film, Deloget has done more than leave a calling-card. She has created, in tandem with her superb star, a vigorous exercise in empathy and a remarkably soulful tribute to all the strong, capable but unconventional mothers out there, who ask little of the world, except to be allowed to raise their children as only they can, with any lack of attention to the letter of parenting law made up for by an abundance of idiosyncratic love.
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