A matter of a moment; Alex (Jean Le Peltier) asks his mother Suzanne (the amazing Jo Deseure) to pass him the colander and the woman hesitates for a few seconds. The screen goes black, with one of those frequent ellipses that characterize Raphaël Balboni and Ann Sirot's debut film, and it is Noémie (Lucie Debay), speaking with her partner Alex, who reconstructs for us what happened next, and it is always she who is the first to notice that perhaps something is not going right.
How do you describe the slow decay of the mind without falling into the rhetorical and pathetic?
The madwoman vita is a perfect answer to this question because, despite the topic addressed and the moments that throw Suzanne's drift in our faces, the two Belgian directors treat everything with lightness, managing on several occasions to make the audience laugh.
< 0>Thanks above all to the character of Suzanne, a nice sprightly and irrepressible old lady, full of vitality, depicted in her little quirks and in her irrepressible desire to live free as she has always done.Her slow shipwreck, which it often breaks the heart, it is approached with delicacy and an eye full of affection and love so much so that in the end one wonders if there isn't an autobiographical experience behind it given how dementia is portrayed, because this is what we're talking about.
< 0>The same amused look is found in many other sequences, first of all the one that illustrates the irresistible conversations of Alex and Noémie with a series of unlikely carers among whom Kevin (Gilles Remiche) will be chosen, a lover of Vivaldi himself who adores Suzanne but turned into a metal version.Clearly while Suzanne becomes a child again, losing her inhibitory brakes and becoming increasingly obsessed with her own foibles, at the same time Alex and Noémie's life also risks falling into a thousand pieces just as the two they have decided to become parents.
The couple's crisis is inevitable also because while Alex is unable to see any light and is totally absorbed by his mother's illness, Noémie, almost an alter ego of the two directors' gaze, manages instead to still see those rare moments of joy, perhaps due to small things.
In the end we will still have to find a way to carry on this crazy life and somehow come to terms with the illness and be able to see that little the beauty that still remains even in the pain.
Sometimes all it takes is a sudden gust of wind to start laughing again, Alex and Noémie finally parents of two children; one is theirs and the other is Suzanne.
EMILIANO BAGLIO
