Ma mère (2004) - film review

When he learns of the death of his father, 17 year old Pierre experiences a sudden and dramatic crisis of identity.   Whilst holidaying with his mother, Hélène, on a Mediterranean island, he undergoes a turbulent and destructive initiation into the mysteries of sex.  His beloved mother, he discovers, is a rampant nyphomaniac, addicted to obscene sexual practices, and his father possessed a vast hoard of pornographic material.   Far from troubled by her son’s rude awakening, Hélène worsens matters by encouraging him to indulge his carnal desires to the full – with disastrous consequences.

Broadly speaking, films fall into two categories: those you watch for pleasure and those you watch to broaden your horizons.  Ma mère is a film that assuredly doesn’t fall into the first category (except for those who have some very weird ideas as to what constitutes entertainment), but probably does belong to the second.  It certainly pushes the boundaries as far as explicit sexual content is concerned.  Definitely not for the faint-hearted, with images of a deeply disturbing nature, Ma mere is a film that is almost too shocking to watch – not because it is necessarily, from an artistic point of view, a bad film, but because the themes it deals with are at the very limit of acceptability.  If the thought of a teenager wanking over his mother’s corpse is likely to offend, you’d be advised to give this film a very wide berth.

Ma mère is based on a controversial novel by Georges Bataille and is the second film to be directed by Christophe Honoré, whose first film, the harsh but engaging drama  17 fois Cécile Cassard, won wide-spread critical acclaim.  On the plus side, there are some exceptional performances – notably from Isabelle Huppert and Louis Garrel – and Honoré’s script succeeds in capturing the complexity of the mother-son relationship, with all its dark Oedipal connotations.   Honoré is less successful in making the film accessible to his audience – his choice of cinematographic style and editing makes the film appear ugly and disjointed, an approach that serves to distance the spectator from the drama, rendering what we see even more grotesque and offensive than it might otherwise have appeared.  The director also has a tendency to veer towards the pretentious on occasions, with some obviously inappropriate music choices played over pretty panoramic shots of sea and sand in a way that totally undermines the sombre note of realism in what went before.  Unattractive in both its subject and its presentation, Ma mère is certainly not the easiest of cinematic experiences.

© James Travers 2007

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