‘My Everything’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Anne-Sophie Bailly. France. 2024. 95min

The feature debut of writer/director Anne-Sophie Bailly, My Everything is the story of a middle-aged woman who must support her disabled son as he becomes a father. It stars French actress Laure Calamy (from hit series Call My Agent!), who won the Venice Horizons best actress award in 2021 for Full Time, in which she played a woman barely holding it together in today’s fast-moving, late-capitalist world. While this new film – which also premieres in Horizons – tackles a different theme, there’s a distinct sense of deja-vu to it, as the protagonist feels like a sister of the woman she played in Full Time. 

So similar to Full Time that both stories seem to be part of a sole, overworked-single-French-mother cinematic universe

Calamy brings a modest international appeal to the role of Mona, a woman in her late forties who works in a beauty salon, and buyers who took Full Time may circle this element of Bailly’s well-acted, if one-sided film – in which characters with disabilities take second place to Mona’s problems as a harried single mother.

The most important — not to say all-consuming — task in Mona’s life is taking care of her thirty-something son, Joël (Charles Peccia Galletto), who lives with a mental disability. He works in an ESAT, a specialised workshop for people with disabilities, where he’s met and fallen in love with Océane (Julie Froger), who also lives with similar issues. Things start to go haywire when, after a tryst in the janitor’s closet, Joël and Océane find out they will become parents.

The youngsters are over the moon but Océane’s parents are very much not on board with the idea, to say the least. And Mona, as a longtime single parent, has to process all this on her own, wondering whether the two can raise a child together when they themselves require daily care.

Bailly, who also penned the screenplay, has written a great showcase for the talents of Calamy, and Mona is clearly the protagonist. This is the film’s greatest strength, as it gives My Everything both an appealing star power and an impressive lead turn that always keeps things interesting. But the film’s one-sided perspective is also problematic, as it means that the non-disabled protagonist is the only character that’s really developed. This comes as a surprise, as Bailly has clearly done a lot of research and has cast Galletto, a disabled actor, and the disabled non-professional Froger, who both impress in their roles.

But the central conceit of the film – parenting by a couple living with disability – is exclusively seen from Mona’s perspective as a problem that needs to somehow be solved, like all the other things that need to be taken care of for her son. This does a disservice to the complex matter, which various authorities keep underlining is a decision that, in France, is completely up to the potential future parents and in which their guardians have no say. It turns the disabled characters into supporting roles in Mona’s story, with the parenting issue finally just another (albeit perhaps bigger) source of the stress, frustration, anger and hopelessness she feels as a single mother trying to provide for her son while ignoring all of her own needs.

Bailly’s solution is to suggest that Mona has been putting herself last since the birth of Joël are two subplots, one involving his absent father, who is supposedly in Antarctica, and the other involving a charming Belgian man, Frank (Geert Van Rampelberg), who takes an amorous interest in her. They are developed in fits and starts and aren’t always fully credible, however hard Calamy works to make you believe Mona is well-intentioned but always in over her head. One crucial decision especially, made in Belgium after she loses sight of Joël at the visually fascinating Ducasse d’Ath parade, could have used a clearer motivation to make it more emotionally credible.

Technically, everything has been very competently assembled but My Everything suffers from a lack of a strong visual identity to set it apart from other realistic, contemporary French dramas. Indeed, it is so similar to Full Time, in terms of not only its stressed-out leading lady but also its blueish colour palette and naturalistic shooting style, that both stories seem to be part of a sole, overworked-single-French-mother cinematic universe.