Milla

Milla is a major achievement, a film that is at once as delicate as it is strong, a fitting testament to motherhood, to survival.

We observe moments of living rather than the beats of a story, all that natural lighting and everyday quiet stirring the sense of lives taking shape before our eyes.

Valérie Massadian's Milla begins with a stylistic bait-and-switch that neatly summarizes the film's overall sense of formal balance.

Although this quietly daring, decidedly nonjudgmental film doesn’t ask or answer a lot of questions, it paints a cumulatively vivid portrait of young love and early motherhood.

The emotional moments that push her life in new directions must be colored in by the audience. Though that never feels like much of an intellectual challenge, and the 127-minute film is in no hurry to paint its picture, something about Milla's ordinariness makes her worth getting to know.