Declaration of War

Valérie Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm wrote this together, Donzelli directed, and the two of them play the leads. What they are recounting is their own life: what happened when their eighteen-month-old son was diagnosed with a rare brain tumour. The couple on screen is the couple who lived it. That could have produced a heavy illness drama. It produced the opposite. The film is fast-cut, scored, intermittently funny and close to exhilarated. The title says as much: the subject is not suffering but declaring war. Donzelli stages hospital corridors not as a field for pathos but as the ground on which two people hold onto each other. Where the film is most honest is its ending, which shows the relationship ending once the illness is survived, and does not present that as a failure. It opened Critics' Week at Cannes in 2011. Who it is for: viewers who like formally restless French drama that resists sentimentality. Who it is not for: anyone who would rather not approach the subject of a sick child.