Daddy or Mommy (2015)

Here we have a French domestic comedy from 2015, in which two attractive professionals discover that a mutual promotion makes their divorce logistically inconvenient, and so begin a campaign of sabotage aimed at forfeiting custody of their children. The premise is played for slapstick. The Leroy household becomes a battlefield of petty cruelties, and the film has no interest in adjudicating who is right. It simply wants the audience to laugh at the wreckage.

On the matter of social consciousness, the pickings are thin. The cast is uniformly white and bourgeois, drawn from the familiar ranks of French screen comedy, and no effort is made to diversify the ensemble or to comment on the absence. Race never enters the frame. Neither does sexuality, nor climate, nor any question of wealth and its distribution. The film in fact regards corporate promotion as an unambiguous good, the prize both spouses claw toward, which places it at some distance from any critique of capital. There is no body politics, no neurodivergent perspective, no historical revisionism to speak of. The children are props. The adults are cartoons.

Florence, played by Marina Foïs, is a career woman who refuses to surrender her ambitions to motherhood, and a generous viewer could extract a faint statement from that. The film declines to make one. Her ambition is a gag, not an argument, and the screenplay never pauses to consider what it might mean. The result is a competent farce with a clean comic engine and almost no ideological content of any kind. It is, by the standards of our current cultural accounting, a barren field. We record the findings without enthusiasm and move along.