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ACTOR
Isabelle HuppertLouis GarrelEmma de CaunesJoana Preiss
DIRECTOR
Christophe Honoré
SYNOPSICS
Ma mère (2004) is a French,English,German,Spanish movie. Christophe Honoré has directed this movie. Isabelle Huppert,Louis Garrel,Emma de Caunes,Joana Preiss are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2004. Ma mère (2004) is considered one of the best Drama,Romance movie in India and around the world.
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Ma mère (2004) Reviews
The Oedipus Complex with Variations from Novelist Georges Bataille
'Ma mère' is a film on the edge. Director Christophe Honoré (who gave us the little jewel 'Closer to Leo') has adapted a tough book by Georges Bataille that explores incest, sadomasochism, love, family dysfunction, and nebulous moral values of conflicted adolescents caught in the web of sexual investigation. It is filled with difficult scenes and ideas and certainly is not a film for the faint of heart or spirit, but at the same time it is a brave film depicting the dissociative state of sexual mind to which we've come after the influences of such thinkers as Bataille, Foucault, Derida, Gide, and others. Christophe Honoré captures an impossible story extremely well on the screen! 17-year-old Pierre (Louis Garrel of 'The Dreamers') is a spiritually challenged adolescent home from his Catholic school to be with his mother Hélène (Isabelle Huppert) whom he idolizes and loves and see his father (Philippe Duclos) who is distant in every sense. Hélène finds it necessary to inform Pierre of her background (her husband raped her when she was very young, causing such anguish that she has become addicted to a life of immorality as a means of escape), a means of warning him of what close association with her could mean. Pierre is blind to all things negative about Hélène and with the news of his father's death, he demands to be included in the wild sexual life of Hélène and her female lover Réa (Joana Preiss). Hélène is sexually attracted to Pierre and elects to include him in her games of voyeurism (watching Pierre during intercourse with Réa, introducing him to the shallow and compulsive Hansi (Emma de Caunes), mutilation, and all forms of debauchery. The group goes to the sunny islands off Spain where Pierre falls in love with the dangerous Hansi and follows her lead in learning about his mother's strange and dangerous proclivities, sexual acts which include the involvement of young Loulou (Jean-Baptiste Montagut), a young man whom they torture for the sake of sexual satisfaction. All the while that Pierre is being introduced into Hélène's bizarre world he is conflicted by his superego in the form of the Catholic Church: he is seen reciting catechism in the desert surrounded by a silent, nude Greek chorus a la Fellini. Ultimately the 'vacation' is over and Pierre returns home with Hélène and the ultimate incestuous aspect of the Oedipus complex plays out in a completely bizarre and very dark way. To say more would destroy the impact of the ending. Isabelle Huppert is brilliant as always, her quiet outwardly plain demeanor disguising the profoundly ill soul inside. Likewise Louis Garrel makes the fragile, gullible, needy and severely conflicted Pierre understandable: we may not agree with his choices as he wades through the strange waters of perversion, but we never lose sight of his vulnerability and passionate need to be loved. There is a lot of graphic sex in this film, but this particular story could not be told without it. Christophe Honoré manages this strange tale by letting the story take us into the realm of the unreal and he never for a moment loses our interest. Even the music scoring is substantive, using Samuel Barber's own setting of his famous 'Adagio for Strings' for the choral 'Agnus Dei', most appropriately heard when Pierre is mentally visiting his spiritual conflicts with his corporal deeds. This is clearly not a film for everyone, but for those who admire the French cinema history of uncovering strange tales, this is a fine example. In French with English subtitles. Grady Harp
Sunshine and incest don't mix
Pierre, an adolescent of seventeen, adores and idolizes his mother. Unwilling and unable to be loved for something she isn't she tells Pierre what she's really like: a woman who was raped by her husband at a very early age for whom immorality has since become an addiction. Pierre is undeterred by this and upon the sudden death of his father demands to be initiated into debauchery. He's ready to go all the way in games that will become more and more dangerous. As attracted to him as to the addictive games, his mother is unable to refuse. This is the basic premise of Honoré's film. When you have the formidable Isabelle Huppert as the mother and the striking and bold young actor Louis Garrel as the son, this becomes something fans of French cinema won't want to miss -- though according to the rules of American distribution they'll have to if they aren't eighteen or over. It will help to know several things: that Ma Mère is a faithful adaptation of the posthumous novel by Georges Bataille, who died in 1962; that Bataille considered the priesthood but had a "furious drive to violate all taboos" and said the brothels of Paris were his true churches; that he admired Nietsche, was scorned by Sartre and his contemporaries but posthumously was a very significant influence on Foucault, Derida, and others. Thus from the French point of view, the film arrives with a pretty formidable cultural heritage. Taking on a literary and philosophical big guy, the young director attracts attention and assumes big risks -- in particular, those of becoming salacious, ridiculous, or grandiloquent; of reducing a fanciful verbal construct to a sequence of all too fleshy scenes. Given the theme, even if he succeeds, the film isn't necessarily going to be pleasant to watch. The blasphemy and shock value of a movie like this depends on a Catholic context that many of us, myself included, don't have. Times have changed since 1962, and even since the recent death of Derida. In the post-modern twenty-first century, as Steven Shaviro recently wrote in ArtForum, "We live in a time in which transgression has lost its sting, when it has become trivial, boring, and irrelevant. Bataille's giddy gaze into the abyss no longer inspires exhilaration or dread." We could imagine two such splendid-looking people as Isabelle Huppert and Louis Garrel, living on a sun-kissed island off the coast of Spain, in a house with a big swimming pool with two adoring servants and all sorts of fun-seeking foreign tourists and lascivious spas near at hand, living the wildest sort of life and even falling into an incestuous love affair. But that isn't really what happens, and I'm not entirely clear what does. If you haven't read the book (and I haven't) some of the sequences won't make much sense. Huppert's character seems to be in an approach-avoidance pattern with Pierre. She teases him, withdraws, but introduces him to pretty partners in her debauchery. There's masturbation, self-mutilation, sado-masochistic rituals. There's strenuous -- but not fun -- lovemaking, but not much love. This is like Pasolini's Salo with more sunshine and fewer people. And it happens last year. The settings and the people are beautiful, but the movie feels inconsistent in style and sometimes is ugly visually, with distracting hand-held camera work (but only sometimes) and poor lighting (but only at times), so you can't always see the nastiness that's transpiring. After The Dreamers and this, I'd like to see Louis Garrel in a film where he does not masturbate on-screen (here he does it multiple times). Though once again Huppert has justified the adjective "fearless," as in Haneke's Time of the Wolf it's not clear her special talents -- her elegance, polish, and hauteur -- were entirely necessary to the part she's playing. As for Garrel, he seems an exhibitionist, which takes some of the edge off his explorations: it isn't clear whether he's pushing himself to the limits, or just indulging a natural impulse to show off. The style and mood of the film seem to shift from sequence to sequence, with some elements of claustrophobia, other times of sunny openness; and a voice-over by Pierre popping up unexpectedly toward the end. Everything is glossy and expensive, but that doesn't constitute a style. Shaviro points out that the movie "replaces the original's pseudo-aristocratic fin de siècle ambiance with a contemporary setting in the bourgeois vacation paradise of the Canary Islands," and in this new setting Huppert's "sexual initiation of her son" (misleading phrase though, since she's more observer and facilitator than seducer) fits in so "seamlessly" with the island's "omnisexual discos and nude sunbathing" that it loses the shock value it had in the original. And the mother's finale after "sexual union" (really just masturbation in bed together) with her son seems more like guilt than going out with a bang as Bataille probably meant it to be. In short: everything is the same, and everything is different. All this led the film to get a rather mixed reception in France and is making it an absolute critical disaster in the US where people don't know or care about the cultural context. For me, it's a disappointment, not because it fails as an adaptation, but because it fails as a film. The subject matter was probably a dubious choice to begin with -- this kind of novel doesn't adapt well; but given the participants, the disappointment's big-time.
daring, but not cheap
As I watched the movie, I felt (probably like many others) somehow shocked by the powerful and explicit images. Yet it can't be said that this is merely done to make a controversial film. The viewer gets a slowly developing picture of the relationship between mother and son, or more correctly of the adaptation of mother's lifestyle by her son. Finally everybody is invited to morally judge the relations, actions and sayings of the main characters. But as most viewers are likely to enjoy the "forbidden" relationships or explicit scenes, who are we to give criticism? This film puts a whole new dimension in the concept of what is normal, allowed or understood as morally acceptable. It's sometimes almost revolting, and yet when you've seen the story-lines that led to these scenes, you may find the actions acceptable (or maybe I've a twisted mind). I would like to call the attention to the beautifully chosen soundtrack and the abrupt ending, which leaves the viewer a little bit disturbed.
What on earth is the point?
Firstly, let me make it perfectly clear that, unlike 9 out of 10 negative reviews for this atrocity, my objection to the film is not a moral one. Undoubtedly, you have read dozens of comments about how this is an amoral, pernicious insult to human decency. The crux of this review is to say that this would be to give the film far too much credit. 'Ma Mere' just smacks of this self-conscious effort to be disturbing, to be offensive, to be shocking. It failed to disturb, offend or shock me, for the simple reason that I could not find any reason whatsoever for anything that happened in this film. In a nutshell, Louis Garrel discovers that his father was a philandering scumbag. Daddy then dies, and little Louis finds out that his mother is basically a hooker. He doesn't really seem the least bit perturbed by this, and happily goes off with Mummy to indulge in the same debauchery as she does. She treats him like s h i t, her "friends" treat him like s h i t, yet - for reasons known only to screenwriter, director and pretentious tw*t extraordinaire Christophe Honore - he still hangs out with them all. What, pray tell, is the point of the film? That the human condition is foulsome, depressing, self-destructive and disgusting? Well, duh! As I have said, this film seems to go out of its way to be offensive, under the guise of a film that is merely observing offensive people. I watched the film on DVD and was particularly amused by Honore and the formerly lovely Emma de Caunes trying to convince me in a supplementary interview that "none of the sex is gratuitous" and that "every sex scene serves a purpose". Give me a break! 'Last Tango in Paris' (which, for the record, I think is a stunning film) had a point, but this!?! Among my favourite examples of how self-consciously foulsome this dollop is, are the scene where one of Mere's friends sticks her finger up Garrel's arse and then Mummy dutifully sniffs it, and the scene where Emma de Caunes sticks her hand up her "still dripping" womanhood and wipes it onto Garrel's chest. "Wow! That's, like, so profound", I hear you say. My sentiments precisely. Beyond this, none of the characters make any sense, least of all our main protagonist. Garrel is treated like crap but still loves (yes, loves) his mother. He fires their servants for *no reason what-so-ever*, he dupes some poor German kid into being hogtied and whipped for *no reason what-so-ever*, he falls in love with Emma de Caunes for *no reason what-so-ever*. It's just completely ludicrous. It's as if a ten year old with a boner wrote the script. This is the kind of film that Beavis & Butthead would enjoy. I ask you, Honore, who am I supposed to identify with? Failing that, in whom am I supposed to invest any emotional interest? I simply did not give a hoot about anyone in this movie and, thus, could not have cared less about anything that was happening. Didn't they teach you that in film school? I know the French New Wave threw the book out of the window, but surely some of the rules still stand? Apparently not... I repeat, I have no moral objection to this pile of steaming cinematic turd, but I simply could not find a point to any of it. My wife found it "intensely boring", which I felt was unfair to boredom and intensity. Indeed, it does not relent form trying to be shocking/poignant long enough for it to get boring. I actually held the faith - right until the final frame, when Garrel falls to the ground beside his mother's coffin and starts masturbating - I held the faith that the point of the past two hours would be revealed. Then the credits rolled. All this film does that is of any note is to go so far up its own arse that is almost comes off as parody. It's a shame Honore didn't realise that before releasing the film, or we could have been looking at the funniest film since 'Airplane'. Sadly, instead we are looking at the most pretentious (and I hardly ever use that word) film since someone handed Asia Argento a camera.
Mamma Mia ...
... as Frank Sinatra said when he introduced his third wife to his mother. What foul-mouthed Dolly Sinatra would have made of this is anyone's guess. It's just another day at the office for Isabelle Huppert whose apparent fascination with sleaze, dysfunction, kinkiness, etc, has yet it seems, to run its course. I bow to no one in my admiration of Huppert in fact I consider her the finest French screen actress currently working if only a whisker in front of Nathalie Baye, Fanny Ardant, Carole Bouquet, Catherine Deneuve, etc, yet it's becoming increasingly difficult to defend her extreme choices role-wise of the last few years (Deux, The Piano Teacher). This is not to say one wants her to remain the innocent Pomme of the Lacemaker indefinitely but perhaps a tad less of the opposite extreme. Louis Garrel is also at home with incest having starred as Theo, the brother, in Gilbert Adair's rip-off of (oops, sorry, homage TO) Cocteau's 'Les Enfants Terribles', "The Dreamers", not a bad track-record for a twenty one year old. Helmer Christophe Honore also writes children's books which is quite a volte face if anyone asks you. The story of Ma Mere is classically simple. Widowed Huppert lives a life in which degeneration would only be a step upward. Son, Garrel is dysfunctional to say the least but then when your mom encourages you to have sex with her friend and gets to watch what can you do. I guess there are two what the unashamed Porn industry would call 'money' scenes; the first where Huppert holds Garrel in her arms as he masturbates and the second, shortly afterwards when Huppert - having slashed her wrists and bled to death in the scene described above - is taken to the mortuary and Garrel is allowed in to say goodbye and chooses to do so by masturbating again beside his mother's corpse. Maybe this is a masterpiece and I just don't get it.