Sweetheart

For the larger-than-life motherly love of Héloise (Sandrine Kiberlain), every departure of her beloved children must have been a small death: She has already had to let two of them go. Now the departure of little Jade (Thaïs Alessandrin) is also imminent. The young woman is about to take her baccalauréat, the French school-leaving certificate. A university place beckons in faraway Canada. In Paris, Héloise is clinging on. Since separating from her unfaithful husband, Heloise has been a happy single mother who also runs her own restaurant. Now she is afraid of loneliness and of a new phase in her life in which she should put herself back in the foreground. She desperately tries to preserve the last moments with her youngest daughter on cell phone videos. When this cell phone with all the snippets of memories is stolen, the world ends for Héloise once again... All beginnings have an inherent magic - but Lisa Azuelo's film is about the demystification of a farewell after her main character has stepped back for her children for decades. It is no coincidence that Jade is played by Thaïs Alessandrin - the director's biological daughter, who raised three children on her own, giving the film a distinctly autobiographical feel. In "LOL", Lisa Azuelos already told the story of a mother who capitulates in the face of her 16-year-old daughter's adolescent moods. Now, in "Ausgeflogen", a long farewell is staged that repeatedly gets caught up in emotional flashbacks: To past conflicts, which repeatedly bounced off Héloise's motherly love, and of course to all the past moments of happiness, which Azuelos recounts with warmth as if from a diary. Love, melancholy, cheerfulness, nostalgia, in short: there is a lot of mother's heart blood in this film - and it is spilled in an enchanting way by star actress Sandrine Kiberlain.