This is what is called entering the big leagues with noise and din. Léopold Legrand lives up to his name, the future will confirm it. First feature film by this French director, The sixth child is a heartbreaking, viscerally effective film that moves you to tears. Legrand here adapts the novel crying rivers, by Alain Jaspard, himself taken from a news item. The story of the book is that of a well-off, even very well-off, couple who buy a baby from a poor couple. But the young director took his script much further. In the version that you will discover – let’s dare, that you absolutely must discover – soon in the dark rooms, the moral is much more vague.
Franck (Damien Bonnard), penniless gypsy scrap metal dealer, and his wife Meriem (Judith Chemla) are already parents of five children when they meet Julien and Anna (Benjamin Lavernhe and Sara Giraudeau), a couple of lawyers who cannot have children. The news of a sixth child to come is another anvil at the feet of Franck and Meriem. The two will therefore propose the unthinkable to Julien and Anna: buy this sixth child.
I was touched by the character of Anna and by the suffering that the injustice of not being able to be a mother can be. I was also touched by Meriem, who believes that this sixth child will be happier away from her. There were two distresses to explore that interested me. They are beings who fight biological and social injustices that I wanted to show without pathos, without misery.
“This story of the exchange of a child for a truck first made me judge the characters in the novel harshly. Then, over the chapters, I lost my moral bearings”, confides the director of sixth child, who did the adaptation and screenplay himself. “I was touched by the character of Anna and by the suffering that the injustice of not being able to be a mother can be. I was also touched by Meriem, who believes that this sixth child will be happier away from her. There were two distresses to explore that interested me. They are beings who fight biological and social injustices that I wanted to show without pathos, without misery. »
“Telling as close as possible to the characters”
It is therefore through much preliminary research, a number of meetings with women who have had similar paths to his heroines and a lot of modesty that he reinvented the characters of the novel by highlighting powerful female figures. “You have to take on the film you’re making, the delicate subject and, at the same time, treat it with the right distance. […] Not being a woman myself, I tried to tell the story as closely as possible to the characters, in their intimacy, but without touching the body. »
It is moreover this frank and modest writing, as Legrand tells it, which seduced the very beautiful cast of the film: Sara Giraudeau (Farewell Mr. Haffmann); Benjamin Lavernhe (My unknown), the Comédie-Française; Judith Chemla (The meaning of the party); and Damien Bonnard (Wretched). “These are people who have projected themselves into these characters. Sara said to me, at the award ceremony in Angoulême — the two main actresses won an interpretation prize at the Francophone Film Festival —: “You have chosen two women for whom being a mother is probably the most important state of being. powerful”. »
The problem was then to keep this modesty on the screen. An approach which, for Legrand, went first through the film genre: suspense. Because, unlike drama, it allows “to stay in the concrete of situations”, he explains. “The characters don’t justify themselves for what they are doing. The ellipses make it possible to tell what they have gone through, their moods. I built the film like a tunnel that gradually leads to drama. The closer we get to giving birth, the more the tension increases and the quieter the film. »
Then, it was a question of adopting an original point of view which rather narrows the attention on, precisely, the tension: “With the team, we tried to think of all the scenes by working on the sides, by asking what is at stake in this scene at the level of the characters, instead of filming the first idea one has of the announcement of a pregnancy or an ultrasound. […] For example, the childbirth scene, which is supposed to be the birth of a child, we worked on it like a series of portraits. I think that’s what gives the film its strength. We don’t need to say things, they are in a subtext. »
The feature film The sixth child hits theaters January 6.