Following her nuanced turn last year in Mike Mills’ quietly wrenching Beginners, Mélanie Laurent makes her directorial debut with another dimly idiosyncratic tale of thirtysomethings finding love and facing grief. Alas, while Laurent and her co-writers Morgan Perez and Chris Deslandes initially set up some intriguing dynamics, they give way all too swiftly to predictable scenes and a crushingly saccharine third act that’s no less risible for being heartfelt.
The plot centres on two sisters, adopted bookseller Marie (Marie Denarnaud) and aspiring musician Lisa (Laurent). Their opposing attitudes to romance – Marie’s a dreamer, Lisa’s a sceptic – drive a wedge between them after Marie develops a whimsically idyllic relationship with customer Alex (Denis Menochet). Whatever your own feelings on the subject, you’ll likely find yourself coming down on Lisa’s side after being forced to endure scene upon scene of aggressively kooky courtship. But after a brush with a speeding vehicle lands Marie in a stage three coma from which she may or may not emerge, the meandering focus shifts to her loved ones as they attempt to carry on with their lives.
It’s unclear why Laurent and co feel the need to largely abandon their initial (and eponymous) focus on Marie and her adoptive family, reducing her instead to a silent and increasingly hackneyed plot device that doesn’t even function well as a catalyst for other characters’ growth. By dividing their script into three sections and giving the bland Alex his own plot strand, the writers spread themselves unnecessarily thin – his rudimentary character development comes too late to feel like anything other than an addendum. By contrast, the sisters’ early dynamic is genuinely compelling and rife with unresolved conflict, but ultimately goes unexplored.
Even Lisa, technically the film’s protagonist in terms of consistent screen presence, feels underdeveloped. We learn that she’s a single mother, that she’s afraid of men and has begun to “avoid life”, but we don’t hear the reasons behind any of these potentially intriguing traits, while her cloying scenes with young son Leo (Theodore Maquet-Foucher, pictured with Laurent) are repetitive without ever being revealing.
Laurent mistakes incident for narrative direction, placing her characters in a dramatic situation and leaving them to wander aimlessly around it for what feels like hours. If you’re brushing up on your Oscar hopefuls this weekend and need a reminder of just how poignantly and incisively The Descendants portrayed the realities of living with a comatose relative, look no further than this as a trite point of comparison.
There are glimpses of a sharp and novel family drama here in the early stages, and Laurent and Denarnaud give layered turns despite the short shrift the latter ultimately gets. Nonetheless the longer The Adopted runs for the lazier and more mawkish it becomes, ending at last on what has to be a very, very strong contender for the year’s worst final shot.
Watch the trailer for The Adopted
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