“My inseparable”, mother and disabled son facing the challenge of separation

My inseparable **

d’Anne-Sophie Bailly

French film, 1h34

Lovebirds are these multicolored birds that can only live in pairs at the risk of withering away. These are Mona (Laure Calamy) and her son Joël (Charles Peccia Galletto). Inseparably linked by unconditional filial love and the disability of this child, who has long since become an adult. Installed in a routine made of tenderness, great complicity but also guilt and moral exhaustion for Mona, a single mother who has long since given up her life as a woman. However, summoned by the Esat (establishment or work assistance service) where her son works, she learns at the same time that her son has a lover there, Océane (Julie Froger), and that she is pregnant. of him. Faced with their desire to keep the child, Mona will have to learn to let Joel take flight.

A subject still taboo

It is this double movement of emancipation which is at the heart of this very pretty first film by Anne-Sophie Bailly. While sensitively addressing a subject that is still largely taboo in society, that of the sexuality of disabled people and their desire to become parents, the director centers her film on the character of Mona and makes her difficulty in letting her son go a story before all universal. First under the shock of the news, she gradually becomes locked into incomprehension and then into refusal of this situation which profoundly upsets her life, bringing to the surface the sum of the suffering and sacrifices endured.

Laure Calamy, whose ability to let her emotions surface is well established, is overwhelming in this role. She makes Mona an ambiguous character, not always lovable, torn between her maternal instinct and the sum of frustrations accumulated in her life as a woman. His reaction is at first selfish and brutal, his love exclusive. Until this trip to Belgium by the sea in which she takes her son to punish him and during which they learn to confront their feelings.

The intelligence of the film is to approach its subject in all its triviality while constantly leaving it in the background. There will never be any question about the nature of the handicap from which Joël suffers. He disappears to give way above all to this close relationship between mother and son. And gives a great score to its actor Charles Peccia Galletto, nominated for the next Césars in the male revelation category.