The folksy film and comedy actor Benoît Poelvoorde features here in a fine story about being forced to grow up too fast due to tricky home conditions. In this case, an immature and MS-stricken father (Poelvoorde) who 15-year-old Lucie (Justine Lacroix) takes care of, lovingly, while juggling school and weekend jobs - and so she tries to get that handsome, sensitive guy in the class to note her existence.
Lucie fills her diary with imaginative scenarios where she lives a more exciting life, the book becomes at the same time her escape and foundation. A valve where the everyday veins can fizzle out.
The film's not-so-selling title refers to Lucie's desire to have just a normal family, but also to the small family duo's attempt to play ordinary before a visit from a social worker, who comes to assess whether Lucie is suffering from living alone with a sick father. Perhaps it would be better for her to move to a youth home?
Lucie's life is probably coloured by her mother's absence, the bullies' rudeness and her father's increasingly faltering health, but the French creator Olivier Babinet (who dealt better with the subject of growing up in harsh conditions in the documentary "Swagger") does not let it burn properly. In fact, there is really no deeper conflict to hang one's undivided commitment on. The small-minded life goes on, no adversity is felt in the marrow.
In other words, a kind and nuanced film that is better suited as a nuanced basis for a high school discussion on the topics involved, than a drama for the adult, tilted eye.
Olivier Babinet himself has said that he was aiming for a mix of master animator Hayao Miyazaki and the Dardennes brothers, and the pretentious parallel is actually not entirely misleading – although Babinet does not quite reach either the magic of the Japanese or the stripped-down but hard-hitting realism of the Belgian brothers.