My Zoe
Directed by Julie Delpy (2021)
| With | Julie Delpy, Richard Armitage, Daniel Brühl, Gemma Arterton, Saleh Bakri, Sophia Ally, Lindsay Duncan |
| Runtime | 102 minutes |
| Release | 2021-02-26 |
| Rating | 7/10 |
After her divorce, Isabelle, a geneticist, tries to get her life back on track. She falls in love and decides to re-launch her career. But her ex-husband, James, has trouble accepting her and makes life difficult for her in his battle for custody of their daughter Zoe. A tragedy strikes them and the family is shattered. Isabelle then decides to take fate into her own hands.
The review
By Marianne Velma 2021-06-23
Impossible. This is the first word that crossed my mind when I left the screening of My Zoé. Impossible to write a review on Julie Delpy's new feature film without giving away the secret. How to make the spectator want (or not) to try this experience without being able to evoke the DNA of this hybrid film? And its unexpected climax? There is only one solution: to take the side roads. Like Isabelle, the heroine of My Zoe, played by Julie Delpy. Obviously, if you don't want to know anything about it, you'll have to go your own way...
First observation: My Zoé is not a comedy. Not at all. This sentence, pronounced by the director during the preview at the Cinémathèque, resounded in the room like an oratorical precaution. As if the people present that evening were expecting to see a variation of Skylab or Two Days in Paris. At the same time in Hollywood, the financiers did not ask her for anything else. But the lady had another idea in mind. An idea that didn't fit in the box in which the producers had put it. And so much the better.
It all starts out like a contemporary urban drama. Isabelle, a talented geneticist, juggles her work, her ex-husband who resents her, her adorable little girl and her new lover. Tragedy looms. Relentless. Unfair. Delpy does not hesitate to film it at length, harshly, without sparing us any of the despair. A choice of realism that tightens the stomach, but which takes all its sense in the second part of the film. When suddenly the intimate drama turns into a film of anticipation.
This transition is made smoothly, with temporal markers that we hadn't really noticed until then. Julie Delpy is in fact interested from the beginning in the love of a mother for her child and the barriers she is ready to raise to protect him. Even to imagine a reality that does not yet exist. The questions raised around ethics constantly question the audience, sometimes making us uncomfortable. But instead of judging, Julie Delpy prefers to ask us this nagging question: and what would you do in his place? To be pondered at length after leaving the theater.
My Zoé
A film written and directed by Julie Delpy
Produced by Dominique Boutonnat, Hubert Caillard, Malte Grunert, Andrew Levitas, Gabrielle Tana
Starring Julie Delpy, Richard Armitage, Daniel Brühl, Gemma Arterton, Saleh Bakri, Lindsay Duncan, Sophia Ally
Cinematography : Stéphane Fontaine
Edited by Isabelle Devinck
Production companies : Amusement Park Films, Baby Cow Productions, Electrick Films, Magnolia Mae Films, Metalwork Pictures, Warner Bros. Film Productions Germany, Canal+, Cine+
Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures (Austria, Germany and Switzerland), Signature Entertainment (United Kingdom), BAC Films (France)
Release date : 7 September 2019 (TIFF), 14 November 2019 (Germany), 5 October 2020 (United Kingdom), February 26, 2021 (United States), June 30, 2021 (France)
Seen on June 23, 2021 at the Cinémathèque de Paris