Since childhood, Mona has been caring for her son Joël, now an adult. A care that is as much a gift as a curse and binds them in a complex co-dependency. Anne-Sophie Bailly, in competition in Horizons, explores the delicate balance between love and dependence in the mother-son relationship, in a film starring Laure Calamy.
Anne-Sophie Bailly was born in Besançon, France, and nurtured her passion for theatre from a very young age. She moved to Paris to take acting classes before switching to filmmaking. Maternity is a theme Bailly holds dear, and is prominent in two of her short movies, very different from one another: The Midwife, set in Medieval-era Alpine region, and En Travail, following the joys and sorrows of childbearing in Montreuil, in Parisian suburbia. The theme also makes an appearance in her upcoming film Mon Inséparable, presented at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
Is there a personal experience or a particular event behind the screenplay of Mon Inséparable?
This film is about possible avenues for parenthood and childbearing. These are issues that torment me for personal reasons, and I wanted to stage them in different ways. In Mon Inséparable, the several characters find themselves facing disability, like Yolande, a woman in her sixties, and her eighty-year-old mother. Both women live in a nursing home, a real place that I visited a few years ago. Their relationship was extremely close and very dysfunctional. The way they interacted shocked me because it exemplified childbearing and family in general. Within their relationship, issues like sexuality and consent emerge in unusual ways. This is what I wanted to show in my film: how the rights of vulnerable people are treated in our society. The way society treats disabled people says a lot about their norms and culture.
What did you learn from it? What would you like your audience to learn?
In this film, I ask questions, I don’t give answers. What determines what being a parent is? People who experience disability are trapped in an institutional and familial network that is full of good intentions, though also of fear and doubt. For vulnerable people, the issue of sexuality is tied to the issues of free and aware consent, to the right to emancipation, and to the right of parenthood. In France, these issues have been exposed only recently, in 1996 for the first time, as the National Council of Ethics was debating the forced sterilization of disabled women. While it’s true that these themes are being discussed as we speak, they are in a legal gray zone all the same, and it is still very hard to press the issue. One of the essential issueI would like to talk about is the right of the children of disabled people to exist.
Mona’s life flows peacefully, but when her son Joël confesses his relationship with Océane, a fellow member of the community for people with disabilities, and reveals that a baby is on the way, her tranquility is completely shattered. This forces Mona to confront decis...
This is your first feature film. So far, you only made shorts. How did you know it was time to go full-length?
Short film is a form of art that is self-supporting, but the point is that to talk about the themes we discussed I needed more time. I wanted characters to have more depth and to have more space, so as to allow them to be inconsistent, if needed. The story came together in editing. Some passages might feel a bit pedagogical, but thanks to good editing, we were able to simplify where appropriate and to ask the right questions. Actors also contributed much to the film, given who they are, offering their input… Altogether, the film is a compendium of what I had to say and what they had to say, and what we had to say together. In no instance do we step into the pathetic, thanks to each interpreter’s excellent professionalism.
How did you pick your cast?
Initially, Mona would be in her sixties. As we were auditioning young men, we noticed most were in their thirties. I had long maintained that Mona had a child while very young, around the age of twenty, so I decided to take a few years off Mona’s age and cast Laure Calamy to play her. I had been following Calamy for some time, and I loved her work as an actress, and as a tragic actress, too. Together, we cast Charles Peccia Galletto as Joël. Charles is a disabled professional actor. He lives on his own and can take care of himself, unlike Julie Froger, who plays his partner in the film. She lives in an assisted-living facility. Either lives their condition in a different way. The are similar to the characters they play in some ways, and different in others.
What does it mean to you to see your film in the Orizzonti section at the Venice FIlm Festival?
I am overly joyful. Before my film was picked, I would tell myself that Venice is the most beautiful city in the world, so I am very happy to be here. This, plus the fact that my film was picked, makes me extremely proud. Some of my favourite filmmakers passed through here, from Pialat to Cassavetes… at the same time, it is very humbling, and exciting, too, to be part of this story. I cannot wait for the audience to meet my film, to see what a full theatre feels like, to feel how the story we created resonates.
What can you tell us about your future projects?
I have a couple ideas on my mind, and for one of those, I will need to work again with actors experiencing disability to tell further stories. I enjoyed immensely both their human contribution and what we were able to accomplish in terms of telegeny, rhythm, poetry… different ways of moving and speaking that fill the movie with sensorial matter.
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