One of the clearest critical successes of the last Cannes festival, Valérie Donzelli's second feature film manages the exploit of telling a minefield of a story (a young couple's child is diagnosed with cancer before his second birthday) without making it feel exploitative or over-filled with drama and pathos. Partly that is based on her talent as a filmmaker, always making the right choices to hold back or lean in to show what her characters are going through. Another factor is how good she and her costar Jeremie Elkaim are, making us feel with them not for them. This actually happened to them in real life, and you can feel the honesty pulsating through the screen throughout. This is a story both very small (one couple's love story) and very big (the remarkable job done by the public healthcare system in France), and Donzelli manages to express both with tremendous aptitude.****
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