Everyone assumed that this year’s César for Best Film would go to Nouvelle Vague by Richard Linklater. The French are, after all, proud that Americans still live inside the legend of Godard. Despite a record number of nominations, Nouvelle Vague was duly honored — including the César for Best Director — yet the main prize went elsewhere. To a film that neither celebrates French exceptionalism nor takes a stand in the loud controversies tearing France apart today.
The award went to L’Attachement by Carine Tardieu. The great intellectuals did not debate this film. Even the public did not turn it into the event of the season: it was well received in cinemas, but it was no blockbuster. What, then, is this film about — the one the industry itself declared the most important, more important even than a reconstruction of Godard?
A child more important than books.
Sandra stands in the doorway of her apartment. Behind her, shelves bending under the weight of books. In front of her, a six-year-old boy whose mother has just died in childbirth. Elliott asks — not insistently, not reproachfully, simply because a child asks when he does not understand:
“Do you have a family?”
Sandra answers as she has answered herself for decades, whenever someone tried to look behind the wall:
“I have books. My family is books.”
The boy is silent for a moment. Then he says:
“But you can’t talk to books.”
There is no pathos here. No music instructing us to be moved. There is only a pause. Sandra finds no reply. There is none. In that single sentence, the child articulates a truth she herself never wished to name: her world is orderly, self-sufficient, sealed — but it does not answer. Books remain silent.
In L’Attachement, there is not a single scene that attempts to persuade the viewer by force. No declarations of love, no tears on cue, no final scene in which everyone discovers that “family is the most important thing in the world.” Instead, there is something far rarer: the slow, uneven, at times painful birth of a bond where no one intended it.
Sandra — a woman in her fifties, owner of a feminist bookstore, who consciously chose solitude, autonomy, and childlessness — is drawn into the daily life of a family shattered by death: the young widower Alex, six-year-old Elliott, the newborn Lucille. At first, she helps out of necessity. Then out of habit. Finally, something emerges that she fears to name, because to name it is to become attached, and to become attached is to risk loss.
There is no romantic storyline in the conventional sense. Alex and Sandra do not become a couple. There is no kiss under the Christmas tree. There are diaper changes at dawn, drawings slipped under doors, conversations in which no one knows what to say and yet words are spoken. There is Sandra dressing up as a Christmas tree so as not to be too visible — a gesture at once absurd and deeply moving, provoking laughter and a tightening in the throat. This is cinema about the fact that attachment need not be grand, heroic, or even voluntary at the beginning. It only needs to be real.
And France, in February 2026, is drowning in words.
In the Shadow of Violence
The National Assembly has passed — for the second time, by a razor-thin majority — a law on euthanasia. In Lyon, a young man has been buried after being killed while shielding women from the Nemesis collective. The right calls it a political murder; the left calls it a provocation by the far right. IFOP reports are cited endlessly: more than half of young Muslims aged fifteen to twenty-four consider sharia superior to republican law. These numbers have become ammunition in a war with no end: death, violence, separatism, the limits of the body, the limits of community, the limits of what we still call “we.”
In Berlin, the jury rewards openly political cinema. The Golden Bear goes to a film conceived as a manifesto against authoritarianism. One might have assumed that the French — a nation of grand words, political passions, and collective hysteria — would move in the same direction.
And yet, in the midst of this uproar, three César awards go to a film whose strongest argument is that its heroine rediscovers within herself a tenderness she had long pushed to the margins of her own biography.
French cinema has always known how to mirror fracture. Truffaut, in The 400 Blows, showed a child fleeing mother and stepfather, ending on a beach with a face drained of hope, marked only by exhaustion. Chabrol saw marriage as a space in which small evils mature into crime. Godard fragmented love into quotations, politics, and irony until nothing solid remained.
That cinema diagnosed disintegration.
Today’s cinema — at least in this verdict — is not a return to an old order. No one here dreams of patriarchy or the nuclear family of the 1950s, of a woman who “finally realizes her place is with children.” Nor is there a cynical relativism according to which everything is constructed and therefore interchangeable. Instead, there is a stubborn, almost physical belief that after deconstruction, after trauma, after loss, the human being can still piece something back together. That beyond ideology there exists a direct relation between people, tenderness, the simplest gestures — human gestures, not tribal ones, not dictated by the logic of the crowd.
It is precisely here that conservatism — the real one, not the one with torches — regains a voice. Not as an electoral slogan, but as a way of seeing that treats human attachment seriously and without irony. It sees Sandra, afraid of dependence, and does not punish her for that fear. It notices her transformation when, instead of a militant book, she faces a small child and allows a long-suppressed maternal instinct to surface. It sees Alex, unable to be the father of a newborn, and does not mock his helplessness. It does not accuse him of macho indifference, because Alex is neither indifferent nor unfeeling. It sees Elliott searching for a mother in a stranger and allows that movement without shame.
Attachment is older than ideologies, older than laws, older than divisions. In February 2026, as the country burns with grand words about death and identity, French cinema chooses a simple sentence: you cannot talk to books. With another human being — sometimes slowly, hesitantly, wounded — you can.
The award given to this film settles no dispute. It expresses a longing for an elementary bond that precedes all disputes and without which no dispute has meaning.
Margot ROUSSEAU
If this text resonated with you, please consider supporting this work by buying me a coffee.
For you, it’s a small gesture. For me, it’s a chance to pursue an independent research project.
👉 https://buymeacoffee.com/margotcinema
No comments:
Post a Comment