Ken Scott's Once Upon My Mother (Ma mère, Dieu et Sylvie Vartan) is not merely a film-it is a shimmering, sepia-toned memory album set to the most divine of soundtracks. Adapted from Roland Perez's 2021 autobiographical novel, the film follows a Sephardic boy growing up in 1960s France with a clubfoot and a mother who refuses to let the world shrink his horizons. But the emotional spine of the story is neither disability nor destiny-it is the voice of Sylvie Vartan, that velvety, heart-skipping contralto that drifts through every corridor of the child's imagination like a guardian angel in go-go boots. For anyone who, like me, discovered her 45s at the age of eight in 1969, the film feels like stumbling upon a beloved secret garden you thought had been paved over by time. Hearing her 2025 re-recording of "Nicolas"-a lullaby reborn-was enough to send me back to my parents' living-room rug, transistor radio in hand, marveling once again at the gorgeous woman with the divine voice who made the world feel wider than the sky.
Leïla Bekhti's turn as Esther, the indefatigable mother, is a small miracle of warmth and ferocity; she negotiates every scene as if it were a tango between worry and wonder. Jonathan Cohen, playing the adult Roland, lets the camera linger on the trembling edge of gratitude-his eyes seem to applaud his mother posthumously. Yet the film's true cameo is Vartan herself, stepping briefly into frame with the unforced radiance of a secular saint. Ken Scott, directing in French for the first time, keeps his palette soft-butter-yellow kitchens, mint-green Dansettes, the chalky blue of a hospital cast-so that every burst of song feels like sunlight on still water. The director has confessed he read Perez's book while quarantining with COVID; you can sense the fever-dream clarity with which he renders the period detail, from the crackle of a jukebox single to the scratch of a schooldesk lid. Amazon Prime Video's inaugural French-language feature is thus a love letter not only to motherhood but to analog childhood itself, when a three-minute pop song could reroute the course of an entire afternoon.
By the final reel, the film has achieved the rare feat of making the audience homesick for a country that exists only in the heart. I left the cinema humming "Irrésistiblement," my cheeks salt-stiff, convinced that Sylvie's voice-still honeyed, still mischievous-had once again stitched decades together with a single sustained note. Once Upon My Mother reminds us that pop music, at its best, is a form of secular grace, and that maternal love, like a great yé-yé chorus, can transpose any affliction into a major key. Merci, Monsieur Scott, for returning Sylvie to the screen and to our collective bloodstream. The little eight-year-old twirling in front of my newly bought record player has never been more alive.
