French humanism teaches a lesson in attachments.
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, the Italian-French actress who rivals Frances McDormand’s butch intensity, adds a soft-voice and delicate manner to her portrayal of Sandra, a middle-aged Parisian who runs a feminist bookstore in The Ties That Bind Us. Bruni Tedeschi’s sensitivity, her Modigliani face and appetitive mouth, leads the film’s presentation of complex stranger-neighbor-family relationships. When Sandra agrees to babysit the child of her hi/bye neighbors across the hall, who are expecting the birth of a new child, her kindliness evolves into unexpected obligations: surrogate mother, romantic interest, family adviser, and spiritual witness.
Director Carine Tardieu interweaves Sandra’s tolerance of six-year-old Elliot (César Botti) and his newborn sibling, Lucille; his widowed stepfather, Alex (Pio Marmaï), who is a banker; and the extended family that includes a non-maternal grandmother, Fanny (Catherine Mouchet); the boy’s distant father, David (Raphaël Quenard); and a married social worker Emillia (Vimala Pons), who considers Sandra a rival for Alex’s affection. Like Sandra, each character embodies what’s popularly referred to as “agency” — asserting their individual eccentricity against social expectations.
Sandra’s unmarried lifestyle follows a pattern of feminist independence; she knows the phrase “white heteronormative sexuality,” but she follows her own rules, a private decency that actively evades other people’s sense of order, including that of her first-wave feminist mother (Marie-Christine Barrault, the ingenue in Cousin, Cousine, from 1975). This sophistication informs Bruni Tedeschi’s characterization of a tough yet womanly woman — Sandra never displays the off-putting harshness that defined McDormand’s two Oscar-winning bouts of Me Too–era standard-bearing, in 3 Billboards and Nomadland. Sandra, in her deceptively demure manner, almost whispers as she switches between Elliot’s need for attention, Alex’s urge for companionship, and David’s advances.
Bruni Tedeschi has worked with Europe’s most forward-thinking filmmakers — Patrice Chéreau, Marco Bellocchio, Claude Chabrol, François Ozon, Ducastel and Martineau, Bruno Dumont, Bertrand Blier — even appearing in films by Steve Spielberg (Munich) and Ridley Scott (A Good Year). Her range of characterizations surpasses the personality traps that limit American film actresses. At age 61, she has aged into a gentleness that makes Tardieu’s French humanist vision convincing.
This is Tardieu’s fifth feature, an adaptation of a novel by Alice Ferney that bore the more illuminating title L’Attachement. Personal experience is apparent in Sandra’s mature responses — through Bruni Tedeschi wearing bookish eyeglasses and showing flashes of temperament when Alex and David ask more of her in intimate moments. Her compassion toward Alex’s children and to Emillia’s fitful, romantic desperation shows acquired wisdom.
Marmaï’s anxious virility corresponds to Pons’s anxious desire — acting on romantic convenience, both attempt to mirror Bruno Tedeschi’s resilient self-sufficiency. These characterizations are not just mercurial but original. They convey the extent to which adult men struggle through grief and survival, and adult women contend with desperation and survival, everyone reaching toward mutual understanding.
The Ties That Bind Us confirms that French women filmmakers differ from American filmmakers — though not just women in particular but directors from Chloé Zhao, Mary Bronstein, and Maggie Gyllenhaal to Alexander Payne and Darren Aronofsky, who all predictably portray female experience according to social trends. Tardieu puts a steady, soft focus on all her characters, whether children or men or women, as people growing into self-awareness.
Sandra can explain her childless life choice, hook up with fellow uncommitted David; then Alex and Emilia respond, marrying nervously in a distinctly complicated subplot. But Tardieu treats them equally, on the same dramatic and emotional level. Her post-feminist heroine settles modern confusion about family structure. It’s an achievement passed from Jean Renoir to Téchiné, and it was a natural winner of France’s most recent César Award for best film.
Rejecting feminist movie clichés, Tardieu structures her film according to the infant Lucille’s early development. The adults recognize themselves through their responsibility to the next generation. Sandra memorably cautions Alex about fatherhood: “Your life is full of love.” When’s the last time you saw an American movie, by a woman or man, that felt so generous and sympathetic?
