Christophe Honoré
Ma Mère (My Mother)

THE REVIEW

Transposing Georges Bataille onto the screen without being able to understand him and/or convey the complexity of the author involves two risks: either creating something needlessly provocative or an intellectual and snobbish film for a narrow elite and bourgeois circle. "Ma Mère" is both things together.

The idea is to pay homage to the French writer and philosopher by translating into images a posthumous, incomplete novel that is certainly not easy to adapt. Honoré resolves everything thanks to the cast: first, a magnificent Isabelle Huppert who delivers a performance, as usual, perfect (even though at times even she seems not to fully believe it) and the decoy Louis Garrel, suddenly a sex symbol and incapable of sketching even a single expression for a character as irritating as few.

"Ma Mère" results in a succession of alleged (and ugly) scandalous scenes to satisfy the (intimate) itch of the salons; scenes that wouldn’t shock even the Moige.

An action that shifts to today's Canary Islands, in a mega-mansion for the rich with a swimming pool, where characters that do not exist, not even as bodies, move.

In this regard, one of the things criticized about the film is "the heap of erotic scenes less erotic than the history of cinema". Breaking a lance in favor of Honoré, I can say that it's the only happy choice: Bataille was exactly like that. In sexual descriptions, he seeks no empathy and, at times, reduces a long love scene to a single word: "Screw". From this point of view, I can't help but respect Honoré a little who, if nothing else, has tried to convey the "sex as vertigo" from Bataille and the wild animality that follows. Bataille was often vulgar, but in his animal vulgarity, he always hid a certain humanity, even tenderness ("Story of the Eye", for example, is an extremely explicit and vicious novel and yet, in my opinion, it is a marvelous coming-of-age). 

Too bad the film is based solely on this. It tells absolutely nothing. It tries, of course, and it does so with a direction that is a parody of the typical directing style of certain French auteur cinema: detached, intellectual and aseptic; yet without style.

The ending, then, is horrendous. Not for the content itself which, albeit scandalous (and that side doesn’t affect me... I believe that in art, cinema, and literature everything is absolutely allowed. Morality should be set aside), but for how it's shot: a choice of shots from elementary school and use of "Happy Together" for an embarrassing oxymoron.

A film absolutely to avoid. Where the forced attempt to be a "cursed object" inevitably transforms it into ridiculous kitschery from a roadside diner.