All to Play For (the much better French titles translates as Nothing to Lose) begins in chaos and ends in something approaching clarity. But the sort of clarity that doesn’t resolve anything. By the end of Delphine Deloget’s devastating first feature, the world she’s showing us has swapped sides: the sensible choices have come to seem reckless and the most reckless choice seems the only responsible one. That All to Play For is a work of social realism should give you an idea of how stinging that reversal is.
Deloget’s working-class heroine Sylvie (Virginie Efira) is mother to two boys, the older Jean-Jacques (Félix Lefebvre) and the younger Sofiane (Alexis Tonetti), a loving kid who can’t always hold his emotions in check. One night while Sylvie is working at her job tending bar in a local club, Sofiane, alone in their apartment (his older brother is delayed getting home), attempts to make French fries and burns himself badly. He’s fine, but the accident is enough for social services to snatch him for two weeks which, when Sylvie appears before a judge, turns into six months in a foster center. There’s no evidence Sofiane has been abused or neglected, but the circumstances of the case—a child alone in the apartment, a mother who the authorities are unable to reach (Sylvie was at work and unable to answer her phone)—are enough for the authorities to feel completely justified in their actions.
What follows is what happens when the messy realities of life come up against the strictures of unforgiving law. During the last forty years of America’s right-wing retrenchment, we’ve gotten used to stories of how women and gay and trans people, and people who choose to live their sexual or family lives outside the traditional models, have become easy targets for social services and the judiciary. All to Play For is a slap in the face to those who presume that good, socially-conscious liberal public servants are any less willing to wreck people’s lives by clinging to their own notions about what’s right and responsible. The social workers and court officers that Deloget and her co-writers Olivier Demangel and Camille Fontaine put on the screen aren’t monsters, but they have made a god of rationality, and they refuse to see the people in front of them. When Sofiane, angered and scared at being separated from his mother and brother, wrecks a room in the foster center, Sylvie argues, sensibly, that the boy can’t understand why this is happening to him and that she should be allowed to see him and calm him down. The workers don’t offer anything to counter her, they just parrot the rules that allowing her to see Sofiane would be rewarding him for his behavior. They all speak for reason and civility and they are all keeping the lid on very tight. They are the epitome of the characterization Pauline Kael gave of the teachers and guidance counselors in Frederick Wiseman’s documentary High School, “the most insidious kind of enemy, the enemy with corrupt values who means well.” Very few of us meet monsters in our lives. It’s the bland, calm-voiced ones—the bosses and teachers and administrators who always have a good reason for why the authority figures they are in obeisance to are doing what they’re doing—who do the most damage.
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