Cannes Film Festival 2023: ALL TO PLAY FOR

Every year at the Cannes Film Festival, there’s a handful of movies like All to Play For. Social realist dramas about impoverished people at the end of their ropes. I blame the Dardennes.

These films, like Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You or Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, usually get rave reviews out of Cannes. Bougie filmmakers, critics, and wealthy people partying for two weeks on the French Riviera probably feel like watching these films is a kind of flagellation act, like they’re less works of art and more works of absolute moral worth. Many of them, like Loach and Arnold’s films, are gut-wrenching, deftly constructed works of art, films so good that they continue to be imitated today by much sloppier social-realist films like All to Play For.

The French film came to Cannes in 2023 with an awkwardly translated title — its French title, Rien à perdre, means Nothing to Lose. Directed by Delphine Deloget and written by Deloget and two collaborators, Olivier Demangel and Camille Fontaine, the film follows Sylvie (Virginie Efira), whose life falls apart after child protective services take her troubled son, Sofiane (Alexis Tonetti). Sylvie goes to court, tries to hold down her job, and continues raising her older son, Jean-Jacques (Félix Lefebvre), but she’s struggling under so much responsibility. At all times, she seems primed to explode.

Main Character Syndrome

Sylvie works an arduous job at a nightclub and is the primary caregiver for her children. So when Sofiane injures himself one night trying to make French fries on the stovetop, Sylvie is at work, and Jean-Jacques pushes him in a shopping cart to the hospital. (Why a shopping cart? Surely ambulances in France aren’t as expensive as they are in America.) Turns out, showing up to a hospital with second-degree burns and no parent or guardian alerts child protective services. They take away Sofiane until Sylvie can get her shit together.

Sylvie is a mess. The character represents how the social realist drama has graduated from “horrible things happening to good people” to “horrible things happening to messy people.” Every decision she makes challenges the audience to still empathize with her. She’s pugnacious, duplicitous, hotheaded, impulsive, aggressive, and irrational, but most irritatingly, Sylvie is so incredibly entitled. She behaves as though things like this have never happened to anyone else before, like nobody knows what it’s like to have your son taken away from you, and like these circumstances are completely outside of her control. She, like her equally quarrelsome, borderline rabid son, Sofiane, thinks she can fight everyone, the entire world, and win — Sylvie and Sofiane have to learn that their actions have consequences.

Sylvie’s Main Character Syndrome persists throughout every scene in the film. She argues with her coworkers, berates her support group, manipulates her brother (Mathieu Demy) into getting her a job, bares her breasts at two cops in the courthouse, and head-butts a social worker (India Hair). The character is so selfish, so heartless, and uncaring, that you’re not quite convinced someone like Sylvie exists.

Kitchen Sink Drama

The point of social realism is that it’s supposed to have recognizable characters. We can see ourselves in the protagonists of Loach’s Sorry We Missed You and Arnold’s Fish Tank either because we have been there ourselves or we know people who’ve been there. We recognize the injustices these characters face and the intractable social trenches they’re trapped in. The gig economy, surging healthcare costs, lack of economic opportunities, abusive boyfriends, and poverty take center stage in Loach and Arnold’s work. They usually make films in the United Kingdom, but the crises they deal with are equally resonant with audiences around the globe.

All to Play For deals with a less universal problem: inadequate and heavily bureaucratized French social care services. I’m not absolutely certain the film is intended to be social realism in the vein of Loach or the Dardennes, frankly, but if it isn’t that — if the goal of the film isn’t to shed light on what Deloget considers social evils and institutions in need of change — then the film is left with being a fly-on-the-wall character study. And as a character study, it sucks, so let’s go back to the social realism angle.

The film epitomizes the kitchen sink drama in its most parodied form — at one point, the characters are literally in the kitchen, trying to drag a burned kitchen stove out of the room. Every scene ends in an argument, everyone’s so quick to blame other people, and so many of the character interactions have an ugliness to them that feels heightened and unrealistic. On top of that — and this is why the character study at the heart of the film falls flat — Sylvie is a complete enigma. Her only concerns are in the moment, and it seems like the only thing she wants is to get her son back. But why? By the time she’s meeting with the judge, we still have no clue what Sylvie is fighting for or why she’s so invested in this battle. We have no idea what she’s angry at, what she’s lashing out against, or what she hopes to gain besides getting her son back.

The fault doesn’t lie with Efira, a gifted actress who I’m sure is better in her starring roles in Alice Winocour’s Paris Memories and Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta. She can only do so much with a character who lacks motivation. We never learn what Sylvie values or what drives her. Does she want Sofiane back because she’s ashamed she lost him in the first place? Because she’s averse to change? Because she doesn’t want to face accountability for her actions? Or does she actually love him that much? She doesn’t even seem to like her other son, J.J., that much! She has a complete lack of appreciation for everyone in her life, no matter how much they stick their necks out for her, so tbh I don’t f*cking care if this person gets her kid back or not! She’s a fair-weather mom, someone who’s willing to put in the work if it means the difference between being down one son and reinstating the status quo.

As if the film is trying to convince us Sylvie is completely in the right, we’re treated to these doting closeups of her, shot from slightly low angles, her face in the sunlight and a soft breeze, the kind of shot that suggests courage, nobility, and martyrdom. But Sylvie just sucks. She’s boiling alive in a stew of her own making.

This isn’t a case of “Unlikable Female Protagonist,” either — surely the point of All to Play For is that we’re not supposed to be rooting for Sylvie to get her son back. Every scene demonstrates that she’s completely unfit to be a parent, and yet the challenge of a social realism film is that, hey, you gotta want her to get her kid back anyway. Deloget doesn’t want to explore the intricate system of social services victimizing Sylvie, so she takes the easy way out, making her case worker a cold, callous person who’s completely incapable of de-escalating a situation. The more Sylvie goes down a path of self-destruction, one is left to wonder if this is meant to be a cautionary tale, if Sylvie is meant to be a hero, or if the final needle-drop of a dreadful cover of “You Are My Sunshine” is meant to imply that true happiness can only be found by shirking all your responsibilities, burning all your bridges, and fleeing to Spain.

Conclusion:

In 2004, actor Mathieu Amalric — best known in America for playing an ax-wielding maniac James Bond villain in Quantum of Solace — was appointed president of the Clermont Ferrand Short Film Festival jury. He was so upset with the short films in the competition that he decided not to give any awards. In a statement later, he explained, “When you see twenty films that simply record a script, without taking any risks in terms of framing, without questioning the way they are filmed, it’s a bit serious… Basically, it’s an aesthetic debate. The content of films takes precedence over love and faith in the cinematographic tool. […] Today, the script takes precedence over the love of cinema, and emotion — which has become a market value — is king.”

The focus of All to Play For is its dialogue and characters. Deloget, to borrow Amalric’s insult, simply records her script, making a film utterly disinterested it is in its own medium. It’s a completely unremarkable movie. Every shot seems haphazard and predictable. There’s no novelty or thought to its compositions. The only aesthetic flourish the film uses in its favor is a strong key light in Efira’s eyes, so that whenever her character speaks, they shine with a white glow. Unfortunately, the filmmaking does not rise to meet her talents. And the editing zips from one argument to the next with such speed that it robs the dialogue and the characters’ decisions of any consequence. There’s just fire and stale air.

What we’re left with is a script so sophomoric in its execution that we get obvious symbols like the burned stove that can’t fit through the kitchen door or a hen whose wings are clipped that Sylvie finds in her club one night. And the dialogue, when it’s not striving to be as naturalistic as possible, is rancid. J.J., a character who struggles with an eating disorder, realizes that he wants to be a pastry chef and says, “Before, I wanted to eat cakes. Now, I want to make them.”

Amalric would likely express pleasure at All to Play For’s complicated characters and embrace the film’s contradictions. After all, not all films have to be or should be, documentaries. But All to Play For just has to be something, instead of what it is, which is nothing. The film is stuffed with conflict directed at nobody and nothing, there’s not a single person worth investing in, and the film’s best character is that f*cking hen, which unfortunately gets dropped off at a farm 20 minutes in. The hen returns, only briefly, at the end of the film. When I saw that hen again, I cheered.

All to Play For premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2023. It is awaiting distribution.

Watch All to Play