The Ties That Bind Us

Sandra, a feminist librarian, is not interested in children. In addition to this ambivalence, she has vowed never to become a mother. When her neighbour Alex asks Sandra to watch his six-year-old son Elliot while his pregnant wife, Cécile, gives birth, Sandra sees it as just a one-off.

Caught between grief and a desire for connection, Sandra, Alex, and Elliot’s lives become entangled in unforeseen ways, creating bonds and challenges as they wrestle with evolving definitions of love. Tender and never didactic, THE TIES THAT BIND US is a powerful reminder that it takes many shapes to form a family.

Review from The National Review

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, the Italian-French actress who rivals Frances McDormand’s butch intensity, adds a soft-voice and delicate manner to her portrayal of Sandra, a middle-aged Parisian who runs a feminist bookstore in The Ties That Bind Us. Bruni Tedeschi’s sensitivity, her Modigliani face and appetitive mouth, leads the film’s presentation of complex stranger-neighbor-family relationships. When Sandra agrees to babysit the child of her hi/bye neighbors across the hall, who are expecting the birth of a new child, her kindliness evolves into unexpected obligations: surrogate mother, romantic interest, family adviser, and spiritual witness.

Director Carine Tardieu interweaves Sandra’s tolerance of six-year-old Elliot (César Botti) and his newborn sibling, Lucille; his widowed stepfather, Alex (Pio Marmaï), who is a banker; and the extended family that includes a non-maternal grandmother, Fanny (Catherine Mouchet); the boy’s distant father, David (Raphaël Quenard); and a married social worker Emillia (Vimala Pons), who considers Sandra a rival for Alex’s affection. Like Sandra, each character embodies what’s popularly referred to as “agency” — asserting their individual eccentricity against social expectations.

Sandra’s unmarried lifestyle follows a pattern of feminist independence; she knows the phrase “white heteronormative sexuality,” but she follows her own rules, a private decency that actively evades other people’s sense of order, including that of her first-wave feminist mother (Marie-Christine Barrault, the ingenue in Cousin, Cousine, from 1975). This sophistication informs Bruni Tedeschi’s characterization of a tough yet womanly woman — Sandra never displays the off-putting harshness that defined McDormand’s two Oscar-winning bouts of Me Too–era standard-bearing, in 3 Billboards and Nomadland. Sandra, in her deceptively demure manner, almost whispers as she switches between Elliot’s need for attention, Alex’s urge for companionship, and David’s advances.

Read the rest of the review from Armond White here...