Other People’s Children
**This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
There’s a level of responsibility we share towards children whom are not our own. Whether it’s as a teacher, an employer, someone dating a divorced parent, or even an aunt or uncle. And if our relationship changes with them, we have to respect that. One of the beautiful things about Rebecca Zlotowski’s film is that the writer-director puts Rachel in situations we’re familiar with, and shows us how she evolves in her views of being a caregiver, and how all the opportunities she has to be a role model to a child shape her by the end.
Rachel (Virginie Efira, an absolute wonder, as always) is a high school teacher who, at 40, has been predominantly concerned with the children in her care as a teacher. When she starts a relationship with Ali (Roschdy Zem), a single father who shares custody of his daughter, Leila (Callie Ferreira-Goncalves), with his ex (Chiara Mastroianni), she begins to really start to wonder about having a child of her own. That is compounded as she begins to be ingratiated in the life of Leila through Ali, and how being a caregiver in a child’s life where they already have two is a different situation than just about any. Add to that her younger sister (Yamée Couture) getting pregnant, and the struggles she has with one of her students (Victor Lefebvre), and Rachel’s concerns about children run deep.
This is not a film built upon wild comedic scenarios or predictable melodrama, but the thoughtful exploration of what it means to be a caregiver, and how that can sometimes impact our own views of having children ourselves. The thing I like so much about “Other People’s Children” is that it comes from a perspective of respective Rachel’s choices- she isn’t constantly badgered by co-workers or family about why she doesn’t already have kids. And when she thinks she might like to try and have kids with Ali, there is certainly some concern from him about her getting pregnant at first, but ultimately, he seems to be on board for whatever happens. This is a film about adults in believable situations, not a farce, and the delicacy with which Zlotowski tells her story, and develops these characters, is part of its charm. One of the most heartbreaking parts of the film involves the illness of a mother of one of the kids in Leila’s judo class- everyone is concerned about her, and the effects it has on the kids. That’s the type of subplot that some films would excise, but this one sees as essential to Rachel’s journey in the film, because it affords her a real opportunity to see how life and death can impact children outside of her own experience.
I do not have kids myself- my wife and I discussed it at the start of our marriage, but ultimately, we’ve found satisfaction simply being an aunt and uncle, respectively, to her sibling’s children. If you asked me before I got married, I would have absolutely expected to be a father, but I find myself content in what life has brought me when it comes to children. “Other People’s Children” does throw some twists and turns in Rachel’s direction, but ultimately, ends with a moment that validates the place she’s in regarding children rather than mourns what could have been. This is a thoughtful, and entertaining, story of life’s challenges, and how sometimes, where we thought we wanted to go isn’t where we were meant to go.
