Director:
Xavier Dolan
Writer:
Xavier Dolan
Stars:
Anne Dorval, Antoine-Olivier Pilon, Suzanne Clément
Language: French
Mommy is 25-year-old prodigy Xavier Dolan’s ode to moms, gift-wrapped in thorns. It’s the story of 46-year-old Diane ‘Die’ Després, a single mom struggling with her ‘problem child’ Steve who suffers from ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder). Diane’s husband passed away three years ago, which caused Steve’s condition to spiral out of control. The film begins with Diane being called in to the state-run detention center that Steve is currently a resident of. Turns out, he set fire to the canteen and caused third-degree burns to a student. So they hand him back to Diane who can now either home-school him, or give him up to the state under the (fictional) S-14 law which applies to juvenile delinquents. Steve played charismatically by Antoine Olivier Pilon, is a hard child to love. He is hyper, abusive, violent and constantly testing the boundaries of parental patience and propriety (at one point he fondles his mother’s breasts). If Steve is problematic, Diane also has her own issues. An alcoholic without a steady job, Diane hustles her way through problems, sometimes using her fading beauty as a weapon. The two of them are fiercely fused together. Their world is narrow. Which is probably why Dolan and his cinematographer Andre Turpin shot the film in a 1:1 aspect ratio that grows on you gradually. The metaphor hits home in a breathtaking moment in the film where Steve reached in into the screen to prise it open to the rectangular aspect ratio we are used to.
“Loving people doesn’t save them”, says the head of the detention center to Diane as she gives up on Steve and urges Diane to do the same. This is where Mommy differs from most representations of motherhood in movies. In being adamant that love exists in parallel and not just as a force of change.The only companion to Mommy that I can think of is Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin.
If you have grown up on a cinematic diet of Nirupa Roys and Jaya Bachchans doing aartis, having ESP and sacrificing everything for the apple of their eyes, this mother-son relationship will make you queasy. (A good indicator of how much you will enjoy this film is how you reacted to the scene in Haider where Tabu kisses Shahid Kapoor.)
Personally, I am a big believe in the power of quease. Especially when it comes to motherhood. <Rant Alert> We are a country obsessed with making everything a mother. Including cows. So a film like this is a wonderful slap in the face of those who insist on sugarcoating and deifying the complexity of raising a child. Most recently, we saw this flawed framing at work in the documentary India’s Daughter, where Jyoti Singh’s mother was presented as some sort of superhuman paragon of virtue. We do a great disservice to moms all over the world when we paste the label of ‘Saint’ on them because it’s only an excuse to not engage with the truth of giving birth and raising another human being. No, I have not raised a child. But I have been one, and I can strongly testify to the fact that it gets ugly.
Mommy is a roller coaster ride through the best and worst of being a mum and being a child. Get it here.
Lady Middlebrow 