A Happy Event

The comfortable, unplanned life Barbara and Nicolas were living ends with their first child. The film shows the happy event of the title and then everything that follows it: sleeplessness, a changed body, a relationship coming apart, and postnatal depression. What Rémi Bezançon does is refuse to prettify any of it. The birth sequence is long and uncomfortable, and so are the months after. The film states directly that motherhood does not automatically transform a woman, that it first takes away who she was for a while. Louise Bourgoin plays this without a single softening move, with Pio Marmaï as the father. The source is Éliette Abécassis's 2005 novel, and the film opened on 28 September 2011. Its flaw is repetition in the second half, where several scenes restate the same point, and an ending that lands exactly where you expect. Who it is for: unsentimental films about motherhood. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a warm family story.