Ma Mere DVD Review:

Ma Mère. 2004, Release date March 4th 2005.

Director Christophe Honoré

Louis Garrel Pierre

Isabelle Huppert Hélène, the mother

Emma de Caunes Hansi

One star.

George Bataille’s unfinished novel makes it to the screen courtesy of director Christophe Honoré. This is very much the director’s own take on a novel that was already idiosyncratic enough in its combination of incest, social irony and ultimate nihilism. Seventeen-year-old Pierre comes home from school in France to join his parents in the Canary islands. When his father dies, Hélène reveals her own indifference to the event to her traumatized, God-obssessed son. Soon, she takes his sexual ( not emotional ) life in hand by introducing him to some very kinky female friends, leading into ever more dangerous games. This has to end in tragedy because the director takes his film very seriously, with cringe-worthy zooms, and in fact, it does.

The tension of the plot exists only in the ‘will they, won’t they’ question. The film seems to want it both ways with Huppert’s character, portraying her as an outsider whose strength we admire, while she is clearly the manipulative motor of the plot after the death of her husband, bent on making her son more like herself, only to abandon him to his own devices once more when she takes up the racket. Where is the motivation in all this, you might wonder. Only in a French film would you expect to hear dialogue such as Huppert’s: ‘In an ideal world this friendship would unite us. But this is not an ideal world.’ More noir than that, ‘I want you to love me for the shame I inspire in you.’ Among the other adaptations made from the novel, her son arrives home already a victim of a religious complex, which is bound up with his admiration for his mother, making his pass-over normality as we know it into mental instability something that happens before the film begins, rather than during it. Garrel, with his Carravaggio-esque looks, would seem to be ideal casting for the part, yet for much of the time he appears to have been imitating the effectless style of the director and Huppert herself. As a result, Pierre is more of a portrait with a blank in the centre than an enigma whose growing pains we follow.

Is the film even sexy? Public, sado-masochistic, gay and lesbian varieties all show up, but whether it amounts to sexiness is very much a question of taste I suppose. Certainly the air of transgression which the director wants to evoke can hardly work when the main characters are already so far out of the loop as social beings. The only challenging scenes were, for me, the final ones, where a Bertollucian sense of scandal does take a hold, suggesting a film that (conceivably) might have been.

Recently Catherine Breillat’s Anatomie de l’enfer seemed to be the Wild Raspberries so to speak of the cinematic season for the portentuousness with which it manhandled the themes of sex and anguish. Ma Mère does not fare better, shedding ultimately little light on the important subjects of a young man’s growing pains, despotic parents and familial abuse. So boos for Honoré’s self-conscious, would-be arthouse film, faint cheers for Isabelle Huppert’s Zen-like ability to rise above it all by sheer inimitable talent, and good luck to the talented Loius Garrel, more famously known as the incestuous brother in Bertolluci’s The Dreamers. Apart from the translation there are no extra features on this DVD. The cinema release in Britain has been timed to coincide with its issue on DVD.



Ryan Izay