My Zoe: A Family Drama That Doesn'T Follow The Rules

Julie DELP, who has been active in the film industry as a talented woman for a long time, has released her new work my Zoe. This work, which is shrouded in a strong atmosphere of family drama, steadily advances in the beginning, follows the way of classic three act drama, but in the process of moving forward, it uses the setting of the near future to discuss medical ethics and morality, and confronts it with the dilemma faced by a mother, and puts forward the author's own solution.

At the beginning of my Zoe, a woman in red is in front of the camera. Her abdomen is bulging and her expression is quiet and happy. As the scene fades out, the leading neuroscientist Isabel and her daughter Zoe appear on the stage. A few plays explain the family's dilemma. Isabeth and her husband James, who live in Berlin, have divorced and jointly supervise Zoe, who is still in kindergarten. Although they have decent jobs and living conditions, their emotions are always bothering them. As a professional woman, Isabella is also inevitably criticized by her ex husband. He thinks that she is addicted to her work and can't take care of her daughter conscientiously.

The broken love between their two daughters is at the core of their daily life. One morning Isabel found Zoe unconscious in bed. She panicked and sent her daughter to the hospital. James arrived later. Waiting for them is the sad news of their daughter's intracranial hemorrhage. After the operation, she was unable to wake up, and the quarrel spread like war. The first half of the film also reached its climax.

Julie DELP's brilliance lies in that she tries her best to add all kinds of details in the first half of the family conflict, and a large number of fast-paced dialogues make the image of a couple who have become enemies but have to keep in touch with each other because of their daughter. In the hospital, the two people waiting for their daughter to wake up from each other's confession, to the finger fury, the development of emotion is natural. For female audience, it should be more representative.

Just as the audience is gradually immersed in the pain of a pair of parents, the style of the film changes in the second half of the film, and enters another narrative level - Zoe is declared brain dead by the doctor, and the grieved Isabella is unable to accept the fact. She hopes to use various means to make her daughter "come back from the dead". Her ex husband thought she was possessed and left with regret. With her medical connections, she found a doctor who helped women conceive in Moscow, hoping that he could help her realize her dream.

At this point, the film has quietly deviated from the first half of the construction of family drama style, and gradually into a future journey. Although cloning technology has been developed in recent years, it has not been put into clinical use in real life. From the beginning to the end, the time in the story setting is not the present, but the near future several years later. Isabeth, who met the doctor, expressed his wish to recreate her daughter. However, the doctor said that although he could help women conceive, there would be huge medical ethical problems and unexpected fertility risks for the children of the past to be born again. Isabella is still trying to persuade doctors, who are gradually moved by her interaction.

If the first half of "my Zoe" also involves specific discussions on gender relations and family life, and pointedly points out the embarrassing situation faced by professional women in the contemporary social division of labor, then the latter half is abstracted as a moving fable. Its whole narrative motive force comes from the obsession of a mother who lost her daughter and hopes to revive her beloved in her life. The desire was so strong that no one around her understood her, and the only one willing to accompany her on this journey was a doctor with a strong sense of career. The change of narrative style before and after the film reflects the ambition of Julie DELP, who is the trinity of editor and director. It has to be admitted that through the tempering of different types of films, Julie DELP's writing skills have gradually grown, from comedy to family drama. Perhaps because of her growing up and working in France and the United States, she boldly integrates cities and their different styles into her own plays - Berlin, London, Moscow She can go through as she likes and deal with all kinds of emotions that come with her.

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