In Safe Hands (2018)

There is a baby, and the baby has no say in anything, which is the central joke of the French child-welfare system as observed here. Jeanne Herry's camera parks itself in the neonatal ward at Brest and simply watches the machinery turn: the anonymous birth, the two-month window in which a mother may reclaim her child, the social workers who cradle the infant through its limbo, the prospective adoptive mother who has spent a decade losing arguments with her own body. Sandrine Kiberlain and Gilles Lellouche do the institutional labor with the flat competence of people who have filed these forms before. Nobody raises their voice. The film's restraint is its entire method, and it is a method that mostly works.

The social awareness on display is of the gentle European variety, the kind that trusts the state and asks only that we notice the people inside it. Women carry this story, and a woman directs it, though the film is content to let motherhood be a human predicament instead of a thesis. There is a quiet faith in public institutions here, an assumption that the adoption apparatus is staffed by decent people doing difficult work. That is a political position, lightly held. It never becomes an argument about money or class or who deserves what. The cast is a standard French ensemble, and the one performer of color appears without the film feeling obliged to comment on the fact, which is either admirable or merely unremarkable depending on your appetite for commentary.

What we get instead is procedural tenderness. The paperwork, the handoffs, the foster placement, the infant passed from arm to arm like a parcel nobody wants to drop. It is affecting, and it is careful, and it preaches almost nothing. A film like this arrives, does its modest, well-made business, and leaves. We have seen the type before. We will see it again. The classification proceeds accordingly, with low numbers and no hard feelings.