What is Nona and her daughters, the Arte series by Valérie Donzelli, worth? (critical)

The director’s first series is based on an extravagant premise – a woman becomes pregnant at 70 – to achieve a feminist and fanciful tale, coupled with a family portrait with modern resonances.

From this Thursday evening, Arte will rebroadcast Nona and her daughters, a successful series initially offered in 2021 on the same channel. It is also visible in replayAnd First recommend it to you.

Élisabeth Perrier (Miou-Miou), nicknamed Nona, runs family planning in the Goutte d’Or district of Paris at the age of 70. This resolutely feminist woman raised her daughters alone, triplets now aged 44: Manu (Virginie Ledoyen), preppy stay-at-home mother of five boys, Gaby (Clotilde Hesme), single sexologist who writes essays on couples, and George (Valerie Donzelli), woman-child who has never left the family nest and who is floundering in writing a university thesis. Nona, for her part, lives a secret love affair with André, George’s thesis director. But when her family doctor tells her that she is five and a half months pregnant and that André is not the baby’s father, mystery sets in and the little troop must organize themselves as best they can. The triplets move in with a man who is a midwife at Nona’s house, whose belly suddenly begins to emit a strange red light which will make her pass to the residents of the neighborhood as a modern-day goddess…

The director Valerie Donzelli has become an expert in the art of dramatic comedy which deals, between fantasy and seriousness, with romantic, family or contemporary societal themes. With this first television series that she signed for Arte, Donzelli is not content to present her cinematographic work in serial form but is deploying a universe in its own right. In these nine 30-minute episodes, co-written with Clémence Madeleine-Perdrillat (screenwriter on OVNI(s) and on season 2 of In therapy), the author-director takes the time to depict surprising interactions between her high-minded protagonists. color. Beyond its fantastic story and the touching character of Nona, who experiences motherhood as a superpower bringing all kinds of complications, the series also has fun drawing a gallery of male characters far from being dominant (besides Michel Vuillermoz and Rüdiger Vogler also appears Antoine Reinartz or Christopher Thompson) who spend their time running behind the heroines.

At the heart of this work where it is a question of phantom paternity and chimerical DNA, the creators brilliantly seize what makes the identity of the serial genre, between closed-door situations, the scent of a sitcom and the establishment of twists in waterfalls. The interior settings, lit by the superb photography of Irina Lubtchansky (the director of photography of Arnaud Desplechin’s latest films), highlight the warmth of the faces while the jazzy tone of the soundtrack serves the changes in The mood, sentimental variations and metamorphoses dear to this series which is adorned in its last episodes with a beautiful solemnity and a convincing political dimension. Revealing its nature as a magical fable about conquering feminism and the unconquered power of women, Nona and her daughters then reaches a scale at which the films of Valerie Donzelli did not always accede. With its joyful intermingling of scientific reflections and timeless beliefs, the series ends up affirming out loud that society must urgently stop making women feel guilty. By creating bridges between eras and generations to call for collective solidarity, this committed work thus defends with vitality a re-enchantment of love and family, by means of images and sensations which serenely celebrate the insatiable thirst for freedom of its heroines.

Valérie Donzelli: “There was something enchanting that happened with Nona”