Isn’t it a shame that when someone says “It’s a French film,” a lot of people, me included, then have to be convinced to go see it? Sadly, Every Other Weekend just confirms the suspicions of the reluctant. Baye plays a young mother who, due to the jealous and spiteful machinations of her powerful ex-husband (Manojlovic), only sees her children every other weekend. The weekend we catch Mom and kids together happens to be a particularly stressful one. Broke, Mom has to perform at a miserable little charity gala in Vichy so she takes the kids whereupon Dad gets pissed and threatens to take the children away. To top it off, her son is in a very bad mood, angry at being abandoned, as he sees it, by his mother. Finally, the stress becomes too much and she kidnaps the kids, unraveling along the way. They have no money and the kids become more and more uneasy at the steadily declining condition of their hotels. For all her obvious love, Baye doesn’t seem like anyone’s idea of a very good mother. She’s easily distracted, she misplaces the kids and she leaves them with sitters or alone. Nevertheless, she does manage to make contact with her son along the way. What bothers me about this film, aside from its relative tedium, is the inadvertent message that Baye has brought much of this on herself. I’m not asking that every feminist message be good news, but this does not seem like the sort of film likely to convince others that women are too vulnerable to the whims of their husbands or other men who hold power over them. Most people won’t get that far with it and those who do may find Baye’s character unsympathetic. This is Garcia’s fault because her vision is chaotic; there is no sense of revelation or understanding on any character’s part. It doesn’t give those of us in the audience much to root for. Instead, let’s hope for better films to make their way across the Atlantic. I can’t help but suspect they’re making them, we’re just not seeing them.
This article appears in November 15 • 1991 (Cover).