He's Not Like Us

“I can’t wait to get home.” Juliette (Valérie Donzelli) and Romeo (Jérémie Elkaïm) exchange looks, exhausted and thrilled in the hospital room where they’re holding their newborn baby, Adam. It’s only a moment later, in movietime, that they are home, but rather than enjoying their new family, they’re miserable. Adam cries incessantly, he won’t sleep, and they can’t sort out whether feeding him helps or not. “It’s a nightmare,” Romeo announces. 

Their first visit to Dr. Prat (Béatrice De Staël) is staged so that Juliette and Romeo appear on one side of her desk, the doctor framed between them. It’s an obvious visual bit: they will be repeatedly caught up in tensions that seem brought on by the authorities they face, embodiments of the crisis. While their first visit to Dr. Prat does end with a solution (feed him more regularly), they’re back in the same office some 18 months later (again, the passing time reduced to a couple of montages), framed in the same way. Asked what’s wrong, Romeo explains, “He’s not like us. He’s not walking, he vomits tons for no reason, and he has huge coughing fits.”

No sooner does he finish the list of symptoms than the doctor suffers her own coughing fit—loudly and alarmingly. It’s not funny, exactly, though it is odd. It also typifies how Declaration of War (La guerre est declare) careens between moods and ideas. On one hand, the film—directed by Donzelli, from a script she’s co-written with her husband Elkaïm, based on their experience with their own son, who was, like Adam, diagnosed with cancer at 18 months (this son plays Adam at age eight)—keeps focused on how the young parents struggle with the news that their son has a brain tumor, in fact, an aggressive and rare form of cancer, news that is deeply affecting and an experience that is painfully personal.

On another hand, the movie skips along to show events, many of them over a long treatment and recovery period. These short pieces follow on the film’s opening sequence, abbreviating Juliette and Romeo’s courtship in a montage: after they meet at a red-lit club, they share kisses in front of fountains, cotton candy at an amusement park. Their crisis is similarly foreshortened, into images of the blood molecules that are tested (in pulsing close-ups), the many doctors involved, the friends to be informed (none of whom seems particularly supportive), the decisions to be agonized over and eventually made.

These difficult moments are comparable to other events: one bit of news leads Juliette into a delirious run through the hospital hallways, the fluorescent lights warping your view of what might be her view, until she is discovered, collapsed, by a doctor who gathers her up and carries her back to her family. It appears that the crisis does bring their families together, his adorable mom Claudia (Brigitte Sy) and her wife Alex (Elina Löwensohn, lovely as always, and barely visible here), as well as her generally forgettable parents (these two couples meet for the first time at the hospital), even as everyone has reasons to come apart.

This coming together is helped along by the film’s lack of histrionics. The doctors are attentive and the “government aid” apparently very easy to get, so that even as Juliette and Romeo lapse into feelings of isolation and frustration, they don’t indulge in the sorts of drama so familiar in their American counterparts (see: Extraordinary Measures). They’re not superhuman, they’re not even fully informed.

Instead they—or the movie—find meaning and context in metaphors. By chance, or perhaps by screenplay fate, their long journey begins just at the moment that the Iraq war begins on a background TV: thus the film’s title.

Like that other war, Romeo and Juliette’s struggle is erratic and seems unending. Like that other war, it involves multiple parties, some brilliantly helpful (like the well-known surgeon they’re lucky enough to have, Dr. Sainte-Rose (Frédéric Pierrot), who attends to them with kindness and care, explaining some of the process but not so much that they panic. They’re also able to “get government aid” for the long-term process, surgery and recovery, with apparent ease, so they might drop out of their own jobs and focus on their child.

Also like that other war, this one occasionally slides into the background, as Romeo and Juliette weary of their perpetual state of crisis and seek solace somewhere—anywhere—else. And so the film shows them coping, more or less, in still more montages. In between their stays at the hospital, cheering Adam with games and TV, they seek escape in their old patterns, partying and dancing. These scenes turn repetitive, as the movie returns to montages and expository voiceovers, indicating the passage of time and skipping over most of it. The young parents wonder why they’re so tested, if there’s a reason for their war. “Because we can overcome it,” she says. And so they look forward to going home, again.