The Ties That Bind Us, the latest feature from director Carine Tardieu, explores the dynamics of a non-traditional family thrown together by the winds of fate. Premiering in the Orizzonti section of this year’s Venice Film Festival, this sensitive drama is sure to elicit more than a few tears as it subtly picks apart the many different and surprising ways that humans can find to love one another, often in spite of even their most stubborn convictions.
The film’s most remarkable arc belongs to Sandra (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), the fifty something owner of a successful feminist bookstore. Fiercely independent, Sandra is happily childfree and determined to stay that way. She has no interest in the young family next door, until one day fate unexpectedly intervenes. When Cecile goes into labour prematurely, Sandra grudgingly agrees to watch her young son Elliot (César Botti) while her husband Alex (Pio Marmaï) rushes her to the hospital, setting her on a path she never could have predicted.
A pair of awkward days pass before Alex returns in tears. Wordlessly, we understand the worst has come to pass. Cecile has died while giving birth to their daughter, Lucille. Humane to her core, and acutely sensitive to her neighbours’ overwhelming grief, Sandra soon finds herself absorbed into their daily lives. Negotiating milestone after milestone by their side, she quickly becomes an indispensable emotional anchor to both Elliot and Alex, despite her decided lack of maternal desire.
Complicating matters further is the presence of Cecile’s kind but grieving mother Fanny, and Elliot’s biological father David (Raphaël Quenard). Refreshingly, these characters fail to fall into petty stereotypes, with Tardieu giving her actors the space to create nuanced and detailed portrayals within the larger space of the film. David especially, who in lesser hands could have been played off as yet another deadbeat dad, is allowed to exist in pleasantly surprising complexity. The film, and the nascent family at its core, is the better for it.
In much the same way as each individual character is allowed to exist in full contradiction and complexity, so are the relationships between them. Tardieu is unwilling to force them into tidy little boxes, even as they themselves try to do just that. Nowhere is this tension more apparent than in the relationship between Sandra and Alex. Understandably, deeply grateful for her support and moved by her growing bond with Elliot, Alex develops romantic feelings for Sandra. Clear-eyed, she resists him, sensing that he’s mourning through her, rather than seeing her for who she is.
In any case, it isn’t long before Alex rushes headlong into a relationship with his daughter’s sassy pediatrician, Emilia (Vimala Pons). It’s been only nine months since Cecile’s death, and both of them should probably know better, but the humans in Tardieu’s world make all kinds of mistakes, just like the rest of us. Inevitably, complications arise. At times I found myself wanting to reach through the screen, take these characters by the shoulders, and shake a little sense into them, but their behaviour never rings untrue. Pons, for her part (like Quenard), imbues a role that could easily have fallen into caricature with complexity and warmth.
The Ties That Bind Us is veritably jam-packed with storylines, and it would be virtually impossible to summarize them all here. Death, love, rejection, sex, marriage, more death, moving, more sex: the action unfolds at breakneck speed, over a period of just two years. Poor Alex must be suffering from emotional whiplash by the end of it. It may have felt a touch more realistic if the action had unfolded over a longer period, but perhaps that’s the point. We never know how profoundly our lives can change in shockingly short order.
The greatest (and most hopeful) truth I took away from this film is that each of us has a greater capacity to love than we may have ever thought possible, and just as it does for Sandra, that love might just take a form you never could have expected. To butcher a line from the film: I loved it. Lots of times.
The Ties That Bind Us premieres in the Orizzonti programme at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.
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