The Rebound / Mon babysitter

My babysitter

I saw the Rebound some time ago. The reviews weren't great, but I thought that as far as rom-coms are concerned, it was more than decent.

For once, it is not about a very young woman, but a more mature one, and she doesn't blossom because of love but because of her work. It is also mainly about age difference, which I thought was a nice change. It doesn't avoid a lot of cliches, unfortunately, but not many films do.

Sandy (Catherine the Welsh) catches her husband cheating, leaves him with her 2 kids and moves to New York. While her friends convince her she needs to start seeing other men asap, she meets young Aram (Doug in the Hangover). She likes him a lot, but her friends get her to believe she isn't being reasonable and is “on the rebound”.

According to Wiki, “Someone who is "on the rebound," or recently out of a serious dating relationship, is popularly believed to be psychologically incapable of making reasonable decisions regarding suitable partners due to emotional neediness, lingering feelings towards the old partner, or unresolved problems from the previous relationship.”

I guess it was well named as a rebound is, in basketball, “the act of successfully gaining possession of the ball after a missed” basket/goal and when I first heard about the film, I thought it was a sports flick. Mind, I have just thought that Sandy is a sports aficionada so that is either very clever of very fortunate.

So why do I find the French title Mon babysitter a bit silly? Not sure. Both titles focus on the male character and what he represents to Sandy, but it takes away all the cleverness of the original title (sports stuff as mentioned above) or the allusion to relationship.

Granted, there is no equivalent expression in French for a rebound in the dating sense, but there is one for the sports term (Rebond).

Apparently, a new expression has emerged as a translation of a rebound, and it's “une relation pansement” - a plaster (band aid) relationship.

So I guess Le Pansement would have sort of worked.

Kinda.