PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 5/24/05)


At first glance, Ma Mère may seem a blasphemous bit of counter-programming. Opening a mere five days after Mother's Day, this uncompromising adaptation of Georges Bataille's novella scandalizes audiences with its explicit portrayal of a young man's sexual initiation by his own mother. But on closer inspection, though it deals in deviance and vice, the movie also dramatizes — in the most extreme fashion imaginable — the complex psychological reconciliation that occurs between any son and his parents. Discovered unfinished after Bataille's death, Ma Mère is among the French poet-philosopher's most confrontational works. In it, Bataille constructs an Oedipal dynamic of Freudian proportions, pushing the tension between mother and son to its ultimate breaking point. Like its source, the movie is not to be taken literally, but as a philosophical provocation (for example, consider the film's climactic death not as tragedy but transcendence), and as such, it's one of the more effective examples of its type.

For Bataille, writing served as a process of confession and self-examination. Its success depended on the author's willingness to acknowledge his own perversity, transfer it to his fictional characters, and follow their inclinations as far into the darkness of his own imagination as they would take him. Writing, therefore, becomes an outlet by which Bataille could explore that part of himself few of us are willing to confront, while reading offered his audience a subversive window into the corresponding desires within themselves. In directing flesh-and-blood actors to take the same path on screen, Christophe Honoré embraces a different philosophical challenge entirely, breaking down the moral barrier between fiction and reenactment at the same time he heightens the material's voyeuristic potential.

For Honoré, the predicament comes in giving his audience a clear enough sense of his characters' condition to justify the actors' fearless contribution — particularly that of Isabelle Huppert, who is dangerously alive at either extreme of her son's Madonna/Whore complex, but regrettably remains either absent or distant for too much of the film. Whereas the novella is defined by long passages of introspective turmoil, Honoré reduces young Pierre's narration to a minimum. The result is at once more specific and more opaque than its source, replacing Bataille's racy euphemisms with explicit vices while depriving the audience of Pierre's inner monologue. Viewers must instead rely upon Louis Garrel to convey the transformation of Pierre's feelings for his mother from blind adoration to carnal fascination. Garrel's performance here reveals Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers for the featherweight fantasy that it was. Ma Mère may appear grungier on the surface, but its themes run far deeper. As in the later films of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Teorema, Salò) and Catherine Breillat (Romance, Fat Girl), Honoré's daring adaptation presents an almost pornographic realism within its poetically surreal framework — although the acting sets it apart from such comparisons.

—Peter Debruge