My Zoe

This multi-national, English-speaking drama tells the story of an immunologist, Isabelle (Delpy), who is breaking up from her husband, James (Armitage). Isabelle and James have an uneasy and difficult relationship with each other, that is fraught with friction. The film is loosely inspired by Delpy’s life experiences, who is the movie’s director and writer, as well as main star.

In the film, James and Isabelle fight about who should get custody of their six-year-old child, Zoe (Sophia Ally). The two of them are devoted to Zoe, but because they are in the final throes of divorce, they argue repeatedly about their respective custody rights. They quarrel constantly about their relationship to each other, their rights to their daughter, and the difficulties of sharing a combined parenting of Zoe.

Zoe’s health begins to falter, and Isabelle grieves for her welfare, as does James for his only child. Isabelle personally decided to raise Zoe with her husband, despite their unhappiness together, but when tragedy strikes through an accident that puts Zoe into a comatose state, resulting in a brain haemorrhage, Isabelle’s life is shattered, and she decides to take her own steps to cope. With Zoe brain-dead, Isabelle thinks that the only way she can keep her daughter “alive” in her memory is to biologically clone her.

Desperately wanting to do everything she can to bring Zoe back, Isabelle makes contact with a controversial medical-scientist, Thomas (Bruhl), who she thinks might be able to help her. Thomas is hesitant to assist, but after conflicted conversations with his own wife, Laura (Arterton), he decides to go ahead with his unorthodox procedures to try to clone a replica of Zoe.

When Isabelle decides to clone Zoe, she does what she knows, as a trained professional, is scientifically improbable. The film begins as a domestic tragedy, and descends into a drama that morphs unexpectedly into a film about unethical and illegal medical procedures and practices, which raises serious moral questions. The film’s plotline is highly complex: it incorporates divorce, life-threatening illness, impending death, death, and confrontation with major ethical dilemmas.

This film centres on a mother’s unrelenting grief, and tells how far a parent will go to deal with the loss of her child. The movie is utterly realistic about the conflicts of motherhood. Its drama is intense, and convincingly acted by both Delpy and Armitage. Delpy captures a mother’s grief completely, and Armitage combines grief about his daughter with the pain of husband caught in the throes of bitter separation. When Delpy steers her film into the reproductive domain, the film veers off track, but Delpy as an actress gives it a compelling force.

As a film about a mother’s grief, it is emotionally involving, but Isabelle’s resolve to clone Zoe seems a decision that is too improbable for her to make. The film fails to debate cloning in a meaningful way, and the movie sets up a morally provocative solution that is not argued in any detail as a plausible one for Isabelle to pursue. The film works as a drama about marital discord and grieving motherhood, but is not convincing when it moves into the territory of reproductive rights that also encompasses random surrogacy and the harvesting of embryos. The passionate fervour of Delpy’s performance is palpable, however, and her acting has genuine impact.