Despite some heat and sympathetic performances and wonderful cinematography, there’s something weirdly glib in director and co-writer Catherine Corsini’s new movie through which a summer season of drama provides us supposedly tragic private discoveries uneasily coexisting with some virtually photo love-style vacation romance.
Khedidja (Aïssatou Diallo Sagna) is a black lady in her 40s residing in Paris together with her two teen daughters – promising scholar Jess (Suzy Bemba) and tearaway Farah (Esther Gohourou) – and dealing as a nanny for a rich white couple, Sylvia (Virginie Ledoyen) and Marc (Denis Podalydès), who’ve little youngsters. Marc additionally has a spoilt moody teen daughter (Lomane de Dietrich) from his first marriage. Sylvia and Marc are heading off with their household for the summer season to their villa in Calvi, Corsica and so they desperately want Khedidja to return on vacation with them to take care of the youngsters; Khedidja is allowed to carry Jess and Farah and they’re going to all be put up, not within the villa, however (a little bit high-handedly) in a cellular dwelling close by.
For Khedidja this can be a painful homecoming; she as soon as lived in Corsica, and needed to depart when her ladies have been simply infants. There’s a tense flashback scene that begins the movie, with all three getting ready to get on a ferry and Khedidja receiving a devastating name on her cellular. Nonetheless, her causes for wanting to depart the island, and what occurred to Jess and Farah’s dad will not be satisfyingly defined in emotional element, regardless of an accumulation of hints, the invention of Jess and Farah’s grandmother and a last, elaborate flashback scene displaying Khedidja’s wedding ceremony. For me, the movie by no means actually delivers on its tacit promise of displaying us Khedidja’s interior life, and what this place and her homecoming means to her.
What it does as a substitute is give us fairly a little bit of melodramatic incidental motion: romantic interludes all spherical, one frankly peculiar try at suicide, a protracted get together scene through which the taking of ecstasy inevitably results in the looks of an ambulance and frowning paramedics. The performances are very robust, and there’s an amazing sisterly relationship between Bemba and Gohourou; they deserved a extra substantial story.
