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Mother and Son (Léonor Serraille, 2022)
🕑 Added 2022-07-22 03:03:34 +0000 UTC
Here's what I wrote for the Viennale catalog description of this film:
Léonor Serraille follows her debut feature, the Camera d’Or winning Jeune Femme (2017) with a film radically different in scope and temperament, confirming herself to be a major new voice in French cinema. A close examination of a family unit under cultural and interpersonal strain, Mother and Son combines intimacy with an expansive use of film time, spanning twenty years in the lives of Rose (Annabelle Lengronne), a young mother from Côte d’Ivoire, and two of her sons, Jean and Ernest. Their story is told in three parts, each focused on one member of the family.
In the first segment we meet Rose, and watch as she bristles under the demands of her relatives and lovers, all of whom expect her to play the role of the humble, hardworking immigrant. Rose’s quest for self-actualization has unanticipated consequences for her children. In the second part, we observe Jean’s struggle to find his place in French society, and to meet the demands of his stern mother. Finally, Serraille turns her focus to young Ernest, who must navigate life without the support of the people he grew up with. Mother and Son avoids many of the well-worn conventions of the European immigration story, suggesting that in some regards, all unhappy families may be very much the same.
Some more critical remarks:
Although Serraille is hardly breaking new ground here, I do think that Mother and Son is notable primarily for the way it spurns the liberal trope of the "worthy" immigrant. Rose is a young mother who left two of her sons back in Côte d'Ivoire with relatives, seemingly on the assumption that bringing two out of four was better than not coming to France at all. But more significantly, Rose refuses to subsume her personality to motherhood and family. She stays out all night drinking and partying, and she hooks up with unavailable men who offer very little in the way of stability for her kids.
The first part withholds any real judgment of Rose, because Serraille takes the assignment seriously. We see the family through her eyes, and only in the second and third segments do we see how her various failures have affected Jean and Ernest. Jean excels in school, seems on the verge of assimilation, but eventually he cracks under the pressure and gives in to delinquency. He's really just following his mother's example, refusing the defer pleasure for some lofty long-term goals. Only Ernest emerges relatively unscathed, but his sense of self is secured by severing ties with his mother. So Serraille skillfully deconstructs the idea that the immigrant experience must be rooted in family. As tragic as it is that these three people -- again, only 3/5 of the original family unit -- cannot hold onto each other, Mother and Son insists that emotional toxicity is universal.
