Mères et filles (2009)
Directed by Julie Lopes-Curval

Film Review

For her third film - after her popular comedy Toi et moi (2006) - director Julie Lopes-Curval takes us into darker territory, exploring the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship whilst also offering a thoughtful, if not downright provocative, commentary on where women's pursuit of personal freedom over the past fifty years has led them.  A much deeper, far more nuanced film than Lopes-Curval's previous offerings, Mères et filles has a deceptive naivety which is a little off-putting at first, but as you get into the film, as the exquisite personal traumas of the three main female protagonists are slowly unveiled, it becomes evident that this is quite a sophisticated piece of cinema, delicately crafted by a young filmmaker who shows far greater promise than her first two films would suggest.

The film's three central female protagonists - three generations of the same family - represent how women have changed over the last half a century, from a domestic slave chained to the kitchen sink, her personal ambitions frustrated by a dominant husband and a society which insists that a woman's place is in the home, to the fully liberated modern woman who regards starting a family as an unfortunate damper on her career progression.  The film's almost relentlessly melancholic tone (which comes partly from its location, on a bleak windswept piece of French coastline) suggests that the constant pursuit of freedom is inherently self-defeating, since today's woman is hardly freer than her 1950s equivalent - the former was chained to the family homestead, the latter is bound hand and foot to the corporate cogwheel.  It is the in-between-generation (the baby boomers) who seem to have been most successful in achieving a happy compromise between career and family.  The film's conclusion is that the pendulum has perhaps swung too far, to the detriment of both society and individual women.

Whilst this is pretty much a conventionally made film drama, it has one stylistic touch that works particularly well, namely the way that the central character Audrey (Marina Hands) engages with her grandmother's tragic story, through a series of flashbacks.  The latter have a kitsch artificiality (reminiscent of a low-grade soap opera) which never lets us forget that what we are seeing is Audrey's simplistic interpretation of her grandmother's life, a kind of mirror by which she becomes aware of the present failings of her own life.  The film is less about the plight of women in the 1950s and more about how today's women cope with the freedoms they apparently have - freedoms which seem, paradoxically, to negate rather than enhance personal fulfilment.  The claustrophobic old house which Audrey moves into, in an attempt to try to connect with her absent grandmother, reveals how confined her life is and how few choices she really has.  She sees an abortion as the only way to deal with an unwelcome pregnancy; otherwise she must give up her well-paid job and become a home drone, financially dependent on a man whose general utility outside the bedroom is non-existent.  It is not her grandmother she is looking for as she rakes over old coals; it is herself, her true self.

Marina Hands, a superbly introspective performer with a potent screen presence, brings as much depth and poignancy to her portrayal of the soul-searching Audrey as she did in her most celebrated role, in Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley (2006).   She is perfectly complemented by Catherine Deneuve who, in a surprisingly tough and unglamorous role, succinctly conveys the anxieties of a mother who just cannot make contact with her daughter, partly because she is herself tormented by a longstanding guilt over what became of her own mother.  The scenes with Hands and Deneueve are the best the film has to offer and have more than a touch of Chekhov about them - the woman and daughter who so visibly need each other and yet who appear hopelessly incapable of making the connection that will enable them both to climb out of their personal quagmires.  Marie-Josée Croze is just as well cast as the most tragic of the three women, the housewife who, trapped in her cosy 1950s time bubble, hasn't even the slightest possibility of escape and yet, curiously, she appears far less unhappy, far less neurotic than the daughter and granddaughter who follow her.

Scripted and directed with intelligence and economy, authentically performed by a high calibre cast, Mères et filles is a meticulously composed film drama that is both insightful and unsettling (its only defect being an abrupt and not entirely convincing ending).  Whilst the film is an effective commentary on female emancipation since the 1950s, it is just as interesting in what it has to say about how men have changed over the same period, from macho posturing ogres who think they own women body and soul, to what now looks increasingly like the weaker sex, the victims of a sexual revolution who haven't quite yet come to grips with the modern woman.  Mères et filles navigates some highly controversial avenues of debate, but it does so with such maturity and personal involvement that its provokes far more thought than bile.

Film Synopsis

Audrey is an independently minded thirty-year-old who has always been intrigued by her family history.  It was in the 1950s that her grandmother Louise abandoned her family when her children were still young, leaving no trace as to where she might be going.  She was never heard of again.  Her daughter Martine - Audrey's mother - remained in her hometown by the sea and became a doctor.  One day, Audrey drops in on her parents, who invite her to stay for a while.  During her stay, the young woman is surprised when, purely by chance, she manages to lay her hands on an old note book belonging to her grandmother.  As she reads the contents of the book with increasing interest, Audrey believes she has stumbled across the reasons for Louise's so far unexplained departure...