Les Enfants vont bien

One is not born a mother: one becomes one, and sometimes ceases to be one.
 — Simone de Beauvoir

Ambrosioni’s film moves along a rugged line, where motherhood is no longer a destiny inscribed in the body or in biology, but a function that may emerge out of necessity, out of absence, out of lack. From this perspective, Les Enfants vont bien attempts a complex operation: to strip motherhood of its normative dimension and restore it as an intermittent experience, at times even refused.

The protagonist is neither a “failed mother” nor an “imperfect mother”: she is rather a figure that destabilizes the very category of motherhood. The film suggests that one may be called to embody it without having chosen it, and that within this call there may reside a form of radical misalignment. Not all women—Ambrosioni seems to suggest—naturally inhabit that role; some traverse it as one crosses a foreign territory, without maps, without language.

On the children’s side, the film lucidly captures the trauma of abandonment: not as a spectacular event, but as a silent fracture inscribed within everyday gestures. Their games, often insistent and repetitive, are nothing but attempts to restage what has happened without being able to understand it. The absence of the biological mother becomes an unanswered question, a void that no substitute figure can truly fill.

The connection with Sister by Ursula Meier is evident and lies in a shared original fracture: motherhood as an unstable function, one that may be refused or imposed, and children forced to grow within this lack, unable to comprehend it. If in Meier’s film the child reacts by filling the void and reversing roles, in Ambrosioni’s film the children remain exposed to the wound, inhabiting it without defenses; in both cases, childhood emerges as a space traversed by absence, where the maternal bond does not disappear but deforms to the point of becoming unrecognizable.

Particularly intense is the sequence in which, after months of absence and suspension, the aunt and the children return to their former home to empty it. This is not merely a practical act, but a passage through memory: each object becomes an emotional residue, each room a stratification of interrupted lives. Deciding what to take and what to leave behind is tantamount to determining which fragments of the past can still be inhabited and which must be definitively abandoned. In this scene, the film reaches an authentic vibration, because pain is not declared but settles into minimal gestures, hesitant glances, into the very difficulty of touching what remains. It is here that loss becomes tangible, and that the bond between the characters is redefined in a fragile yet shared form.

And yet, precisely where the film seems to touch a point of truth—this tension between an imposed role and the inability to embody it—certain cracks begin to appear. In its attempt to render the drama accessible, Ambrosioni occasionally indulges in overly explicit narrative solutions, slipping into moments of almost didactic pathos. Some scenes seem to guide the viewer toward a pre-coded emotion, rather than allowing it to emerge from the complexity of the situations.

These lapses do not entirely undermine the strength of the project, but they do soften its impact, making that zone of ambiguity—so rigorously evoked in the film’s strongest moments—less incisive.

What remains, however, is the quality of the performances, which sustain the entire emotional architecture of the work: the actors render with precision that tension between proximity and distance, between need and refusal, that constitutes the film’s core. It is above all in silences, in restrained gazes, in unfinished gestures that Les enfants brûlent finds its deepest truth.

Ultimately, the film takes shape as an imperfect yet necessary investigation into motherhood as a non-universal, non-guaranteed experience—at times even improper and imposed. A motherhood that may occur without ever being born, and that for this very reason reveals itself as fragile, intermittent, constantly exposed to the risk of never fully coming into being, especially when one’s life had been definitively oriented elsewhere.

To be a child means to go on calling someone who does not answer.
 — Pier Paolo Pasolini