Ricky

I will not reveal what it is that makes this baby special but suffice to say you’ll need to suspend a good degree of  disbelief. I came out of the film thinking “who would ever come up with such a bizarre plot?”  The answer:is English novelist Rose Tremain, who wrote the book, entitled Moth, on which this film is based). But despite its oddness Ricky is strangely compelling, and has many elements that are not only an amusing and engagingly magical fairytale-like but results in a worthy family drama.

Ozon is a director who excels at relationship tales and here he handles the blossoming affair between Paco and Katie beautifully, as well as the issues that arise between Lisa and Paco and the gradual warming of each to the other. Ricky is a tale of ordinary people but it is precisely against this “ordinariness” that the extraordinariness of baby Ricky stands out. And although we have a unquestionably bizarre baby, the mother treats it with the same instinctive care due to any offspring. The relationship brings home the way that mothers accept their children, no matter what.

Ozon weaves his plot cleverly. In the opening scene we meet a distraught Katy confessing to a social worker that she can barely cope and may have to give her kids over to welfare. Then we flash back to several months earlier, and the mystery remains of how we interpret this first scene as we are never quite sure again where in film's timeline it is situated. When later the media frenzy begins, there are many funny scenes although things get a little too overwrought towards the end, making for a bit of genre-bending strain.

All the actors give themselves over to their parts, especially young Melusine as Lisa, a girl who is almost the most adult in the house, hauling her mother out of bed when she doesn’t want to go to work. At times the plot approaches the unbelievable, but everything is handled in such a way that we simply give ourselves over to this intriguing film experience.

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