Here is a film about a very complicated and painful kind of coming of age, or maybe a meditation on “coming of age” as something that never actually happens; it also examines the illusory dividing line between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience, present and past.
A son remembers his single mother: her wayward passions, her boyfriends, her yearning unhappiness – which he can see now but couldn’t then. He and his brother experienced the toughest of upbringings with her, as immigrants from Ivory Coast in 1990s France (two other brothers were mysteriously left behind). It is a narrative that is to end with mother and son meeting as adults, although these two people will perhaps never be able to see each other as such; never be able to decide if this a grownup moment for forgiveness or accusation, or if the burden of silence imposed by love has finally lifted.
