Adapted from the novel by Alain Jaspard, crying rivers, The sixth child, the first feature film by Léopold Legrand, depicts a baby and two couples, one rich and sterile, the other poor, with five dependent children already. This drama carried by a quartet of prestigious actors will be released in theaters on September 28, 2022.
Franck (Damien Bonnard), scrap metal dealer, lives with his wife and five children in a caravan. He is already getting out of it with difficulty when he finds himself involved in a fight that turns out badly and leads him in front of the judges. Julien (Benjamin Lavernhe, of the Comédie-Française), his lawyer, manages to get him a release.
During a visit to the site of the Travelers where the scrap dealer’s caravan is installed, Julien and his wife Anna (Sara Giraudeau) admit to Franck and Meriem (Judith Chemla), pregnant with their sixth child, that they are sterile. A few days later, Franck, feeling cornered, requests an appointment with the lawyer to offer him an arrangement…
Adapted from the novel by Alain Jasper, this first feature film by Léopold Legrand tackles the delicate question of the desire for children, and parenthood. Anna and Julien have obviously gone through all the ordeals that a sterile couple must face to have a child, without success. Anna can no longer bear the sadness of their big empty apartment, without children.
On the other hand, for Meriem and Franck, happy parents of a large family, the arrival of a sixth child risks upsetting the fragile balance of their precarious life. These two distresses will find a meeting point in an arrangement that was initially as unimaginable, for the lawyers, attached to the law, as for the scrap dealers, fervent Catholics. The initiative is launched by the men, quickly overwhelmed by the will of the two women who will do everything possible to carry out this crazy outlaw project…
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Without moral judgment, the film explores the whole range of feelings that run through the two couples, launched into this crazy enterprise. With strong, sometimes even iconic images around the mystical figure of the mother, the camera, closer to the characters, captures Anna’s mad desire for motherhood, ready to transgress the law in full knowledge of the facts (she is also lawyer), then the swing and the childlike pleasure she feels in “playing” the future mother.
We also share the amazement, the anger of Julien, trapped by Anna, but also the silent pain of Franck, or even the suffering of Meriem, who in this gesture of abandonment pushes the sacrificial love of a mother to the extreme. .
Sara Giraudeau, Judith Chemla, Benjamin Lavernhe and Damien Bonnard compose a virtuoso quartet, where each one plays without false note his partition of a complex human tragedy. The sixth child is also the story of a clash between two worlds that everything opposes, the expression of a social fracture here erased by the complicity of the two “mothers” around the child who arrives.
With this first feature film, Léopold Legrand, himself sensitized by his personal history to these questions of abandonment and adoption, avoids the pitfall of caricature on a subject which could precipitate him there, with a setting fat-free stage and actors of overwhelming sobriety.
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Gender : Drama
Director: Leopold Legrand
Actors: Sara Giraudeau, Judith Chemla, Benjamin Lavernhe (of the Comédie-Française), Damien Bonnard
Country : France
Duration : 1h32
Exit : September 28, 2022
Distributer : Distribution Pyramid
Summary: Franck, a scrap dealer, and Meriem have five children, a sixth on the way, and serious money problems. Julien and Anna are lawyers and can’t have children. This is the story of an unthinkable arrangement.