After Welcome to Marly-Gomont, director Julien Rambaldi presents “Welcome to Maternity”. We enlarge the line, but with It’s lifeyou will quickly realize that we are not the only ones to press too hard on the pencil…Comedy fresh at first, the narrative strings gradually grow for a less pleasant viewing than expected.
The miracle of life begins with couples. Julien Rambaldi presents five of them, completely opposite. There is the blended family with the invasive guru-like grandmother, the lesbian couple who called on a friend for an “old-fashioned” impregnation, the workaholic businesswoman and her stay-at-home husband, the couple who hope that this third in vitro fertilization (IVF) will be the right one and finally the “dating site” couple made up of Barbarella 132 and Caramelito 45, who are unaware that they are going to become a dad.
To manage all these little people who arrive at the maternity ward with their waters emptied along the way, we have Dominique, midwife on the eve of retirement, and the new kid, Doctor Antoine Moretti, who are also perfect antagonisms l each other. These do not agree on anything, each being convinced of being right. From these five births, each character will come out changed.
Scuttling!
This choral film, as we see so many in the category of comedies, perfectly illustrates the adage “the best is the enemy of the good”. In wanting to do too much on the comic level, the duo of screenwriters formed by Julien Rambaldi and Thomas Perrier scuttles itself, and that’s a shame. He begins to tell us beautiful intimate and universal stories, but he spoils them by preferring to bet on a comic situation when his gallery of characters, if it had been exploited to its full potential, would have provided all the necessary springs.
The gags, welcome at first, become excessively incredible and drag the story down. The part centered on the character of David Marsais (the IVF dad), in the form of an extreme race, begins as an original humorous guarantee, then takes the downward slope of absurdity and ends up boring.
In the same vein, the delivery of the businesswoman, played by Marie Drucker, sins by its one-upmanship and a reconciliatory discourse which, apart from a few vulgarities, seems straight out of a Christmas movie. It’s in season, you might say, but here we were hoping for better.
So as not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, we will still give this credit to the film for making us smile by pinning down certain typically French clichés that we would prefer to be far from reality.
The benefits of measurement
It’s a shame that situation comedy takes up so much space, because it’s to the detriment of the psychology of the characters, who don’t all manage to win the hearts of the audience. Among characters that are sometimes too caricatural, only the more measured protagonists, such as the IVF mother and the father of a blended family, come out really endearing.
The director still manages to soften us with these characters in situations as varied as those observed in today’s society, and who all have to face their problems.
The film also has the merit of giving pride of place to spouses (and spouses), too often relegated to the rank of extras when it comes to childbirth. These having a real existence in this story, the moments of complicity of the couples are all the more credible and touching.
The actor Nicolas Maury, whom we adopted and have not let go since we discovered him in the series call my agent, plays here the obstetrician increasingly overwhelmed by the situation and remains delightful from start to finish thanks to his delicate game. And of this delicacy, we want more, because the film, however very promising, would have gained with more sobriety and sincerity.