Venice Review: Virginie Efira In Rebecca Zlotowski’s ‘Other People’s Children’

deadline.com:

Blended families, where children alternate between parents and spend their lives with an assortment of half-siblings or kids from their parents’ previous relationships, are now so normal that it’s easy to overlook how painful the blending process can be.

Bitter separations, disrupted households, new beds and new people appearing in them, the resentments children feel for the grown-ups’ failures and the interloping new partners pawing at the mom or dad who is rightfully theirs: none of this is easy, even in splits later described smoothly as “amicable.”Rebecca Zlotowski’s Venice Film Festival competition entry Other People’s Children (Les Enfants des Autres) wades into those murky waters with clear-eyed empathy, recognizing the cumulative power of small hurts.

It starts with a new love affair. Virginie Efira plays Rachel, a dedicated high-school teacher in a district that clearly has its fair share of truants and troubled homes.

Roschdy Zem is Ali, an industrial designer she meets in her evening class learning guitar. They are middle-aged but flirt like teenagers, spend nights together and soon enough are making impassioned declarations of love.