David O'ConnellMa mère (My Mother)
May 17th 2010 04:47
Raw, provocative but despairingly vacuous, Christophe Honore’s ultimately repellent adaptation of a novel by Georges Bataille will have you scampering into the shower block in search of a numbing, skin-scouring scrub.
It all begins at a picture-postcard locale, a gorgeous island in the Mediterranean where a young man, Pierre (Louis Garrel), returns from boarding school to stay with his father (Philippe Duclos) and mother Helene (Isabelle Huppert) for a while. When his father is called back to France on business and dies suddenly, Pierre is left in the care of a mother he barely knows. This will soon be rectified however, as he is promptly ushered into the crucible of her depraved, fetishistic pleasure dome. It will be an eye-opening indoctrination into a lifestyle that values uninhibited physical pleasure and moral corruption as the meaning of life.
Purporting to be some profound exploration of the dark side of human sexuality where all manner of moral borders can be blithely crossed as if they were cracks in the pavement, Ma mère (2004) succeeds more in raising uncomfortable, then disgusted laughter than any part of the viewer’s anatomy. Helene has her son accompany her to the local club where the community’s wares are on full display; she openly admits to Pierre that she’s nothing more than a slut, and decides that it's time for her little boy to become a man. In waltzes her lover and ‘instructor’ for hire, Rea (Joana Preiss), for the express purposes of rubbing Pierre’s nose in the random pleasures of endless debasement in public places.
Does Pierre object? Is he repelled by his mother's true nature as any normal person might? Of course not. Where's the fun in that? And think of what he'd be missing out on: like getting to participate in a three-way with Mummy and Rea in the back seat of their car, culminating in a particularly juicy moment when Pierre gets to suck an anally-polished digit. Later he passes out from inebriation, only to awaken on the floor of a mall with Rea’s tongue buried in his anus, before deadening sex takes place, Mummy Dearest watching with slack-jawed detachment from the sidelines.
The decadence falls into a repetitive loop from this point and though there are alterations in faces, everyone looks the same when naked in Honore’s absurd, low-grade provocation. When Mummy and Dea head off on a prostitution tour of the mainland, Pierre is left in the care of another exotic vixen and hired help in Hansi (Emma de Caunes). No prizes for guessing what happens next though fear not, Mummy returns just in the nick of time for a semi-shrouded union of blades, sex and death; there’s even a brain-harpooning coda that features masturbation over a corpse in what is a final witless, misguided stab at profundity.
Mother and son get just a little too close in this one.
Honoré’s film is a mess, a taboo-swallowing botch-job, hovering in the same extraneous realm of wretched pointlessness visited by Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (2004) and just as unerotic. The narrative becomes disconnected from any recognisable reality early on and makes not even the most half-hearted attempt at a reconnection; instead inferring the most puerile psychological justification for its existence.
Pitched forward with the lumbering strokes of an arthritic man dragging a corpse uphill, Ma mère is actually guilty of the worst cinematic crime of all: inspiring a toxic, deadly boredom with the sheer audacity of its awfulness, full of pretentious excesses like grainy hand-held shots and rapid, increasingly distracting zooms.
Honoré’s evocation of this sordid island of flesh exchanges is certainly adept, I'll give him that; every pore glistens with sexual potential, the clues to imminent debasement obvious in every leering B-grade porn smile, in every bad-porn-masquerading-as-art- house-fare cliché.
The film’s absurdity reaches critical mass in scenes which attempt to evoke the supposedly religious rationale underpinning Pierre’s transgressive conversion. Speaking of Hansi, he rhapsodises about her physical properties and comes up with pearls like this: “Her ass makes me realise I never really loved God.” And yet almost in the same breath: “God is my way of losing my senses.”
Indeed, Ma mère is my way of losing ninety minutes of my life; so much more with that elongated shower session tacked on. Deep down, we all harbour a bit of the voyeur inside us all, but how much self-hatred are you capable of stomaching? Expect a swift chemical reaction to ensue. Keeping a barf bag handy would be a good idea. Or maybe a needle to poke out your eyes.
| 137 |
| Vote |
subscribe to this blog
Comment by Matt Shea
Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
Comment by David O'Connell
20/20 Filmsight
Screen Fanatic
Bryn, check your messages!
Comment by Anonymous
I wish my childhood was so enlightened.