INDEPENDENT FILM FOR INDEPENDENT MINDS

Thomas Jouvet (Vincent Rottiers) rejects his middle class, adoptive parents as a teen and struggles more than his younger brother to come to terms with a birth mother he remembers clearly. She gave them up when Thomas was four or five. He begins to search for his birth mother and finds her pregnant and living with a new a husband. This puts to rest his desire to reconnect with this woman for several years. At this point, the film jumps into the future and we find Thomas relatively well adjusted. He has a solid relationship with his brother, and his adoptive mother. His father is fading fast with an unnamed illness with symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s and is put in a home. Thomas has a job. But he doesn’t seem to have an interest in women like his younger brother. This is, of course, until he decides to find his birth mother a second time, without telling the rest of his family. This time, Thomas is an adult of twenty years. In what is disturbingly similar to a romantic relationship, and under lies and false pretenses, Thomas moves in with his mother Julie (Sophie Cattani), and his young half brother. He tells his birth mother he’s moving to a distant town for work, and refers tells her he’s finally seeing a woman who can only be Julie. A family dynamic slowly takes shape, although Thomas is now unemployed, so traditional gender roles have been switched. Thomas gets angry when his mother and half-brother are late for their dinner. He worries over his half-brother spending time with the boy’s better off birth father. And Julie takes great pleasure in making Thomas jealous by rubbing her romantic endeavors in his face, asking him to babysit while she goes on dates. It’s perverseness at it’s very finest, although, no real lines are crossed in a physical way.