By Adam Nayman

Call her The Best Person in the World: dedicated teacher, doting daughter, supportive sister, and successfully, sexily single in the City of Lights, Rachel (Virginie Efira) lives a semi-charmed kind of life, punctuated by irised-in transitions that remind us we’re watching a breezy French festival movie. Every so often, her kindly gynecologist Dr. Wiseman (honourary Parisian Frederick Wiseman) reminds her—and us— that her biological clock is ticking, but as a fling with a well-preserved single Dad (Roschy Zem) deepens into love, it seems like Rachel is ready to embrace a new, if complicated, role as a stepmother. 

The problem for Rachel is that said complications deepen into a big, intractable mess. The problem with this movie is the transparency with which writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski engineers her heroine’s various crises, one after the other after the other, like stops along a bus route. A mid-film revelation about the tragic fate of Rachel’s late mother—and its lingering psychic damage—already feels like undue pathos-mongering; by the time Rachel finds herself in the exact same situation, it’s as if the screenplay were going berserk. Efira’s magnetism is as real here as in Benedetta (where she essayed a very different version of wanting to have it all), and she sells Zlotowski’s bum dialogue just as well as the good stuff. Confronting her lover in the aftermath of one offhandedly cruel slights, Rachel laments that he’s turned her into the most banal version of herself. It’s a moment that rings even truer than intended.