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Ma Mere

Oddly intimate maternal relationship takes center stage in Christophe Honore's respectable, tightly coiled, but ultimately unrewarding adaptation of Georges Bataille's posthumous novel. Uncommercial in the extreme, due as much to its incestuous subject matter as to its actual onscreen content, pic should generate some fest interest.

An oddly intimate (to put it mildly) maternal relationship takes center stage in “Ma Mere,” director Christophe Honore’s respectable, tightly coiled, but ultimately unrewarding adaptation of Georges Bataille’s posthumous novel. Uncommercial in the extreme, due as much to its incestuous subject matter as to its actual onscreen content (which is more implicit than explicit), pic should generate some fest interest and offshore sales thanks to the presence of top-billed Isabelle Huppert in yet another quietly astonishing performance.

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Set among the sun-drenched Canary Islands, pic unfolds predominately in the summer vacation home shared by brooding, 17-year-old Pierre (Louis Garrel), his emotionally distant father (Philippe Duclos) and his impulsive, somewhat childlike mother, Helene (Huppert). No matter the natural beauty, it’s easy to smell that something is rotten in this seaside retreat. Maybe it’s the way Helene too-playfully pushes Pierre into the swimming pool and then leeringly coos, “You’re soaked.” Or perhaps it’s how Helene speculates, upon planning an evening out on the town with Pierre, that he might be mistaken for her lover — and the way she seems to get excited by that thought.

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Pierre seems nearly as needy of Mom as she of him, and that bond only intensifies when father dies in a car crash. In that moment and its immediate aftermath, the already claustrophobic space occupied by these characters seems to collapse further, leaving Helene and Pierre its only permanent residents. As the summer winds on, others drift momentarily through this intensely private domain, including a dark-haired siren named Rea (Joana Preiss) who, in one of pic’s more attention-getting sequences, sticks her finger up Pierre’s rear while simultaneously kissing and fondling Helene’s breasts — all in the backseat of a taxicab. (Rea is, we gather, Helene’s sacrificial offering to Pierre — the woman he can have, even though she’s not the one he wants.)

As the unspoken sexual tension between mother and son intensifies, “Ma Mere” becomes increasingly unpleasant viewing, and too often Honore seems to be at a distance from his characters, not really getting underneath their sunburned skins. But to his credit Honore strikes and (for a while) maintains an impressively controlled tone of slowly encroaching dread, presenting his potentially sensational material in a straightforward, unsensational way that recalls Michael Haneke’s Huppert vehicle, “The Piano Teacher.”

Ultimately, though, Honore cannot suppress his delight at shocking his audience into submission, and the film tips over into more overtly absurd shenanigans. In this, he is ably added by the young Garrel, last seen as the provocateur bother in Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” and here continuing to evidence a special mastery for embodying perversely tormented teenage souls. Garrel, while appropriately intense, is the sort of uber-method actor whoactually appears comfortable masturbating on screen and then urinating on the floor (as he does here).

Huppert, on the other hand, embodies Helene with subtler thrusts of her actorly life-force, ever resisting the temptation to conceive of the character in familiar terms of good or evil. Her Helene canvasses the terrain in-between monster and matriarch, nourishment and hunger.

Tech contributions are solid, with lenser Helene Louvart employing an abundance of natural light to lend pic the ironic feel of easy-living summertime.

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Ma Mere

Market / France-Austria

  • Production: A Gemini Films release (in France) of a Paulo Branco and Bernard Henri Levy presentation. (International sales: Gemini Films, Paris.) Produced by Paulo Branco. Directed, written by Christophe Honore, based on the novel by Georges Bataille.
  • Crew: Camera (GTC and Listo Film color), Helene Louvart; editor, Chantal Hymans; set decorator, Laurent Allaire; costume designer, Pierre Canitrot; sound, Thierry Delour; sound designer, Jean-Claude Brisson; line producer, Sylvain Monod; assistant director, Sylvie Peyre; casting, Richard Rousseau. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (market), May 19, 2004. Running time: 111 MIN.
  • With: Helene - Isabelle Huppert Pierre - Louis Garrel Hansi - Emma De Caunes Rea - Joana Preiss Loulou - Jean-Baptiste Montagut Marhe - Dominique Reymond Robert - Olivier Rabourdin Father - Philippe Duclos

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