Mumu (2010) - film review

France, 1947.  Despite his protestations, 11-year-old Roger is sent by his bullying father to a boarding school in a small village in Anjou.  The school is run by the tyrannical Mumu, a middle-aged spinster who has no qualms about beating the infants in her charge if they misbehave or do not keep up with her lessons.  Roger has become so used to being ill-treated by his parents that he is taken by surprise when Mumu shows an uncharacteristic kindness towards him.  She sees that the boy has the potential to do well at school and gives him extra lessons.  But Roger is a difficult child.  Resentful of the way his parents have treated him, easily influenced by boys of his own age, he soon gets himself into trouble.  How long will it be before Roger’s father carries out his threat to have him committed to a state reformatory...?

Twenty-three years after his last film, Les Deux crocodiles (1987), director Joël Séria makes a belated return to French cinema with this banal but strangely likeable chronicle of wall-to-wall child abuse set in a picturesque French village of the 1940s.  It has taken Séria almost twenty years to bring this autobiographical account of his childhood experiences to the big screen, and that probably explains why the film feels somewhat stilted and dated.  The stylistic and narrative flair that Séria brought to his most celebrated film, Les Galettes de Pont-Aven (1975), is noticeably absent from this tepid replay of Truffaut’s Les 400 coups (1959), although the film does have a few things in its favour, not least of which is a charming cinematic style that effectively evokes the era in which the story is set.

Mumu suffers somewhat from being the latest in a spate of films dealing with the traumas of childhood in post-war France.  Christophe Barratier’s Les Choristes (2004) and Yves Hanchar’s Sans rancune (2009), arguably the two best examples of the genre so far, have told us as much as we need to know about what children suffered through the hellish union of post-war austerity, parental neglect and brutal teaching methods.  Mumu offers pretty much more of the same, another generous helping of childhood misery, served in a piquant sauce of self-pity and parental loathing, although it somehow manages to avoid the excruciating mawkishness to which this kind of film is particularly prone.

To its credit, the film does not take itself too seriously.  Whilst some of what it shows us is shockingly brutal (the scene in which a father viciously lashes out and kicks his 11-year-old son is barely watchable) there is also a fair smattering of humour.  Some will doubtless fault Séria’s mise-en-scène for being too conventional, but it is appropriate for this kind of film as it helps to emphasise the temporal separation between ourselves and the subject of the film.  In contrast to so many recent period films, Mumu really does look as if it is set in the 1940s.  The only thing that gives the game away is that none of the child characters looks as if he inhabits this era.  Self-conscious and equipped with a well-developed paunch, each member of Séria’s ensemble of child actors appears to have circa 2009 stamped on his forehead.  Such a pity that CGI effects technology is not yet sufficiently advanced to enable filmmakers to morph today’s smug, chubby-faced infants into the withdrawn emaciated urchins of yesteryear.  At the very least, Séria could have asked his child actors to lay off the crisps and hamburgers for a few weeks prior to filming, if only for the scene in which they strip to their underwear and go frolicking about in a river, something that comes scarily close to looking like a remake of The Blob.  At least we now know what happened to the European butter mountain.

It would be interesting to know exactly what criteria Séria’s casting director used to select the child actors - acting ability, charisma and a modest girth were presumably way down on the list of requirements.  Apart from Balthazar Dejean de la Bâtie, who at least manages to win our sympathy as the snivelling punch-bag Roger, there is barely a homeopathic dose of talent amongst the child portion of the cast.  This might explain why Sylvie Testud looks as if she has been pumped full of steroids, shamelessly overacting in an attempt to fill the histrionic void created by her plump little co-stars.  With her colourful portrayal of the archetypal folcoche, Testud at least manages to energise the film and make it far more entertaining than it might have been, but falls somewhat short of making her character completely convincing.  It is only in her very last scene, a heart-breaker if ever there was one, that we recognise her as the great actress that she is.

Mumu is such a fascinating character - so severe on the outside, and yet capable of such affection and warmth when provoked - that it is a great pity that Séria did not go the extra mile and make her the centre of the film instead of distracting us with pointless digressions.  Only one character in this film is entirely convincing, the ludicrously hypocritical priest, played to perfection by Jean-François Balmer.  Most of the other adult protagonists - notably the bullying father played by Dominique Pinon - are little more than grotesque caricatures.   Cameo appearances by Michel Galabru and Antoine de Caunes serve only as unwelcome distractions from what the film should be about, the unlikely relationship between the unloved Roger and the seemingly loveless Mumu.  

For all its shortcomings, Mumu is a film that is easy to engage with, mainly because Séria never lets us forget he is telling his own story.  As in Truffaut’s film, we are compelled to empathise with the brutalised child protagonist and feel his pain, resentment and crushing sense of despair as he endures the injustices that are thrown his way and tries, in vain, to win the affection of the parents who have chosen to despise him.  Little Roger would doubtless have ended up as one of life’s failures, a scoundrel, a suicide or a double-glazing salesman, had it not been for the sympathetic attention of a dowdy fire-breathing schoolmistress with a heart of gold.  Mumu may not be a faultless piece of cinema but it is not without value.  It forces us to reflect on our own experiences and acknowledge the debt we owe to those selfless individuals who not only equipped us with an education but also gave us a sense of self-worth and identity.  Just where would we be without people like Mumu?

© James Travers 2011

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