Ma Mere [2005] [DVD]

I'm a big fan of Isabelle Huppert - but this not her finest hour.

There are multiple problems with this film, but the dominant one (pun intended!) is motivation. Or total lack of. Characters just do things without the screenwriter or director telling us why; there is no psychological insight. In some films / situations this wouldn't matter but given the highly perverse nature of the 'action' this is a serious omission. So what might have been erotic or challenging simply becomes bizarre - or worse - deeply unpleasant to watch because we have no idea why the characters are behaving as they do. If a mother has an incestuous relationship with her son, the least I feel I'm owed is some kind of explanation!

I'm sure the film is meant to be a metaphor for something or an existential exploration of sexual mores but in this it fails too. Instead I felt it was indulgent and obscure with a big dollop of pretension. The Happy Together scene at the end might have been comic if I wasn't so thoroughly distasteful.

Despite these criticisms, the one positive is the wonderful Ms Huppert. Even with this poor material she totally dominates the screen (pun again intended) with her unassuming but potent charisma. The film is even poorer when she vanishes in the middle act with Rea. Instead of this film, I would recommend you see either Violette or the Piano Teacher - much more interesting and satisfying movies.

A film which, like "Emmanuelle" (1974), features beautiful people in sultry settings, challenging the proscriptions of social mores, "Ma Mère" differs in its narrative sophistication and intellectual arrogance. Isabelle Huppert plays a mother, perhaps past her prime, but still beautiful, elegant, eminently desirable, and sufficiently rich to be bored with the need to concern herself with life's trivia.

Her adulterous husband dies, her son (Louis Garrel) returns from boarding school. They inhabit a lotus eating world in the Canaries. Huppert tires of her sexual experimentation with her own mistress and becomes consumed with desire for her boy. She begins by allowing other women to seduce him, coyly watching, gradually being drawn in to more physical contact.

It's beautifully filmed, beautifully performed - Isabelle Huppert is outstanding in pretty much anything she does - but you're left wondering what was the point. In fact you find yourself fast forwarding past the sex scenes in frantic search of a story or meaning. Given the quality of the production, you wonder why these resources were squandered on a pretentious shocker and not on the making of a film with real significance.

Director Christophe Honore has been compared to Catherine Breillat, but "Ma Mère" is a superficial effort to push the boundaries compared to the humanistic sophistication of Breillat. If this is an attempt to demonstrate that Western consumerism and wealth have sanitised us to emotion and feeling, cast us adrift in an anomic state desperate for both meaning and sensation, then it might have been better to explore the themes by setting the story in a run-down tenement block, making the poverty of consumerism that more emphatic. As it stands, "Ma Mère" has its moments, but moves with too turgid a pace to fully engage your sympathy, your attention, or your willingness to believe that it has any significance in exploring human interaction and relationships.

Firstly, let me make it perfectly clear that, unlike 9 out of 10 negative reviews I have read 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 appallingly, her "friends" treat him appallingly, yet - for reasons known only to screenwriter, director and pretentious twit 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 girlfriend found it "intensely boring", which I felt was unfair to boredom. 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 would be hilarious if it were such an insult to basic human social intelligence. 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.