You Don't Choose Your Family (2011) poster
2011 · comedy · adventure · disaster · music

You Don't Choose Your Family

Directed by Christian Clavier1h 43m2011
ElsewhereIMDb5.62k
  • warm
  • kinetic
  • gentle
Movie DNA

Warm, breathless, gentle comedy / adventure, grounded in texture. Redemptive, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.

How every film is hand-scored →

César Borgnoli, an unsuccessful car salesman from Italy, lives well beyond his means. In order to get out of his financial disaster, he agrees to a deal: he pretends to be the husband of his sister's girlfriend Kim so she can legally adopt a little girl from Thailand. Caesar believes this to be a great idea and is looking forward to his trip to Thailand. After all, he is going to be able to mix business with pleasure--so he thinks. He didn't expect the local police, the Chinese Triads and the director of the orphanage to chip in, who want to make sure that little Mai is going to end up in a nice family.

Our read · You Don't Choose Your Family (2011) reads as a warm, breathless, grounded comedy · adventure · disaster entry — gentle in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, redemptive in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.

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The shape of You Don't Choose Your Family

Tonight, this looks like

What watching it is actually like.

You want silly French farce about fake marriage and adoption adventure.

ends warmyou’ll be fine aftergrabs you earlygrips by minute 10attention 2/5earns its lengthsubtitles: full
Date nightWith friendsSoloWith parentsKids around

Skip it tonightYou want smart comedy or realistic family stories.

If You Don't Choose Your Family is your film
DNA · twelve axes

The reading.

Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.

Mood · HeavyCosy
Pacing · Slow-burnKinetic
Intensity · GentleExtreme
Weirdness · ConventionalSurreal
Hope · NihilisticRedemptive
Stakes · IntimateEpic
Humour · NoneBroad
Reality · GroundedFantastical
Density · SparseTwisty
Warmth · ColdTender
Auteur · TransparentSignature
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