The Belgian television film C’est mieux la vie quand on est grand, produced by RTBF and Pascale Breugnot, belongs to a tradition of early-2000s francophone public television drama: modest in scale, unspectacular in form, and serious about moral texture. It avoids sentimentality, avoids spectacle, and trusts quiet realism to do its work.
The plot is stark. A nine-year-old boy, Courgette (played by Antoine Fonck), accidentally causes the death of his mother. In the aftermath, he forms a tentative but decisive attachment to the policeman who finds him. What follows is not a story of rescue or redemption, but of responsibility emerging under constraint.
That restraint matters. The film does not ask us to admire anyone. It asks us to watch what happens when an adult responds, imperfectly, to a need that cannot be deferred.
Organisational love rather than consoling love
In the terms of Desire, Work, and the Search for the Significant Other, the love depicted here is neither romantic nor therapeutic. It is organisational. It reorders time, obligation, and future possibility.
The policeman does not “complete” the child emotionally, nor does the child redeem the adult’s life — and this is one of the film’s central strengths. Nothing is planned, justified, or designed in advance. The relationship forms organically, according to currents neither of them fully understands or controls. There is no programme, no social script being followed, no rational calculation of suitability. What binds them is not intention but compulsion: a sense that events, once set in motion, cannot simply be stepped away from. The bond has the character of inevitability rather than choice, arising not from moral design but from response to what has already happened. In this process, each forces a re-alignment in the other. The adult’s routines, expectations, and self-understanding shift; the child acquires continuity, horizon, and a sense that tomorrow exists.
This is love as vocation rather than fulfilment — the same kind of love that drives adoption at its best. It does not promise happiness. It promises work, patience, and eventual release.
Imperfection as a condition of care
Crucially, the adult is not portrayed as fit in any ideal sense. He is unsure, constrained by institutional limits, emotionally inarticulate, and plainly inadequate by contemporary standards of preparedness. The film does not excuse this; it relies on it.
Here the film aligns closely with my wider argument against classificatory thinking. Fitness is shown to be a retrospective judgement, not a prerequisite. Care begins before competence. Readiness grows out of responsibility, not the other way around.
This is a quiet rebuke to a culture that increasingly treats moral worth as a checklist.
Letting go as the aim, not the failure
Most importantly, the relationship is not meant to last in its initial form. This is not a “till death do us part” bond. Its orientation is toward growth rather than permanence — a direction already implied in the film’s title, C’est mieux la vie quand on est grand, which looks beyond attachment toward adulthood. Much of what happens in the film appears unmotivated in the usual sense, driven less by decision than by circumstance. Characters act because situations press them forward, not because they have reached clear resolutions. The policeman’s unguarded joy in the boy is one of the film’s most convincing moments, emerging slowly rather than being assumed from the outset. By the end, nothing is settled or secured. One does not see confident autonomy so much as the possibility of a future. The film offers no closure, but it does establish the cornerstones of a viable family life. Raymond is reconciled with his son after finally speaking truthfully about the car accident, and the son’s acceptance removes a central blockage in the adult relationship. Courgette, in turn, shows his capacity for attachment and responsibility by intervening to protect the boy during a fight. These moments do not resolve the future, but they make it possible. What emerges is not a completed family, but the conditions under which one might realistically take shape.
Placed alongside my article entitled Desire, Work, and the Search for the Significant Other, the film functions as a worked example of several core claims:
- that the most consequential loves are not those that gratify, but those that organise life over time;
- that recognition can take the form of responsibility rather than affirmation;
- that meaning is generated through endurance, not intensity;
- and that letting go is not the opposite of love, but one of its proper conclusions.
The film also quietly affirms something central to my anthropology: a life need not be “well designed” to become meaningful — it needs only to be answered truthfully when it demands response.
Antoine Fonck gives an outstanding performance as Courgette through a spontaneous empathy that captures mood rather than explains it. He registers atmosphere, tension, and trust with an ease that feels unforced and entirely unselfconscious.
