“I film life because I love life, I don’t want it to slip away,” says the father of Faustine Cros, explaining his near-obsessive creation of home movies in her documentary A Life Like Any Other. He claims he wanted to be able to later show his wife how beautiful their family years were. Nostalgia has always been commonly associated with such image-making. But when Cros revisits this personal archive, she unearths a very different story from the one her father intended, staging an act of feminist retrieval as she validates instead the perspective of her mother, who experienced domesticity as profoundly unfulfilling.
Faustine’s mother, Valerie, attempted suicide in recent years by swallowing pills, and the director approaches the footage almost as evidence, to determine when Valerie’s life began heading toward that point. Piecing episodes together, she reveals a woman who feels desperately trapped by parenting’s demands, curtailed career success and the banality of household chores. World premiering at Dok Liepzig this week. this quiet but intensely personal and perceptive work ventures into taboo territory in challenging traditional conceptions of motherhood and gender roles, and should find appreciative slots in festivals with space for smaller gems of creative documentary. It contributes to a strain of new feminist cinema about women who do not consider raising children their ultimate role in life, or nurturing as their defining trait.
Photos that Faustine finds in an old box show her, before her two children were born, working as a make-up artist for the cinema, a career she loved and excelled in, earning more money in the industry than her husband John-Louis, a film director. John-Louis constantly films their early years (as the rest of the family eats dinner, he stands with camera in hand, and even sleeping, Valerie is not freed of the intrusive recording of her every breath.) He has produced enough material over the years that Faustine is easily able to assemble a chronological narrative of her mother’s life on screen, editing in her own later conversations with her family, and giving her own interpretation in voice-over as a reproach to her father’s gaze.
Valerie takes a break from her career to have her babies, and when she returns shortly after, she is sidelined from top jobs as she cannot commit her time totally due to childcare responsibilities. What could have seemed in less rigorously questioning or more sentimental hands a self-indulgent dive into strictly personal details grips us with the widely resonating predicament of a woman who not only has had her source of creative expression stifled, but in having every detail of her new identity as stay-at-home mother immortalised on film, is being held captive forever in someone else’s preferred image — a near-horror story of being deprived of the right to define oneself.
Valerie is charismatic and non-conventional, with a fiery spark that prevents her seeming merely entitled. The chain-smoker (for what else is there to do inside all day, she declares) directs her resentment not toward her children, with whom she takes on the alter-ego of the bandit La Valere in play, but at men, and a patriarchal society that enables her husband to travel often for work, while leaving her to take care of the endless, “repressive” signing of school forms and “nonsense” housework. In a kitchen outburst that was the catalyst for John-Louis to cease his incessant filming, she says only women feel the full drear of domestic reality. Valerie was treated for postpartum “blues”, and John-Louis regrets that she always saw the dark side of things — “the side not made to be seen.”
Between his insistent imposition of happiness on the family narrative and limited understanding of mental health struggles, and the child Faustine’s concern that she is the cause of her mother’s depression, the film feels at times like an uncomfortably loaded project to alleviate misplaced guilt or right the imbalance of a skewed history, as the director asks whether it is really a sickness to care about freedom. But it is in this complex, prickly emotional territory that the film, on its surface slight, finds its brave and honest force.
Director, sound: Faustine Cros
Screenwriters: Faustine Cros, Ivo Neefjes
Cast: Valerie Cros, Jean-Louis Cros, Faustine Cros
Cinematography: Faustine Cros, Jean-Louis Cros
Editing: Faustine Cros, Cedric Zoenen
Producers: Julie Freres, Camille Laemle
Music: Ferdinand Cros
Production companies: Derives (Belgium), Les Films d’Ici (France)
World sales: CBA (Belgium)
Venue: DOK Leipzig Film Festival (International Competition)
In French
68 minutes
