Thursday 16 February: Mia Madre (15)

Italy  –  Drama  –  Year: 2015  –  Running time: 106 mins
Language: Italian/English/French

Audience response following the screening of this film Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.97 from 31 responses)

  • ‘Excellent’: 11 votes
  • ‘Very Good’: 12 votes
  • ‘Good’: 4 votes
  • ‘Satisfactory’: 4 votes
  • ‘Poor’: 0 votes

Read the comments here or join our discussion to add your own comments

Synopsis:

Critics have acclaimed Moretti’s latest film as his best for many years, at least since The Son’s Room: we screened what is possibly his most well known work, Caro Diaro (The Diary) many seasons ago. Here is a warm, witty and seductive tale concerning a film director, Margherita, working on a film about factory workers staging a sit-in, while coping with a difficult actor (John Turturro is wonderful here) and dealing with a fractious personal love life.  Moretti himself has a key acting role.

Margherita Buy’s performance takes it to a high plane of emotionalism.
Paul Byrnes (Sydney Morning Herald)

Director: Nanni Moretti
The Caiman (2006) / The Son’s Room (2001) / Caro diario (1993)
Cast:
Margherita Buy              …   Margherita
John Turturro                 …   Barry Huggins
Giulia Lazzarini              …   Ada
Nanni Moretti                 …   Giovanni
Anna Bellato                  …   Attrice
Beatrice Mancini           …   Livia

(for full cast, and more information, see “Mia Madre” in IMDB)

CFC Film notes:                              (click here for printed version)

Mark Kermode, film critic for The Observer, seemed to enjoy this latest Moretti film very much and found great merit in it:

“Italian tragicomic auteur Nanni Moretti approached the subject of his own mortality in 1993’s international breakthrough feature CARO DIARO (DEAR DIARY), which documented, among other things, his all too real encounter with cancer. In his most celebrated feature, the 2001 Palme D’Or winner LA STANZA DEL FIGLIO (THE SON’S ROOM) he dealt superbly with parental bereavement and mourning.  Now, in MIA MADRE, he focuses on the impending loss of a mother, drawing heavily upon personal experience (Moretti’s own mother Agata died while he was completing 2011’s HABEMUS PAPAM (WE HAVE A POPE), but also keeping enough distance from his subject to achieve a sense of universality.  The beautifully observed and delicately balanced result is a sublimely modulated blend of laughter and tears, a film that cuts to the very heart of profound personal loss without ever losing sight of the fact that life, in all its chaotic comedy, carries on regardless.  For my money, it’s Moretti’s most satisfying film to date, a richly mature work that brings together themes – life, death, love, film-making – that have haunted his entire career.

“At the heart of MIA MADRE is a trio of women: Livia, Ada and Margherita…  It is upon
Margherita’s shoulders that much of the drama rests as she attempts to complete a Ken Loach-style political drama, ‘Noi siamo qui’ (We Are Here’), about the dignity of industrial action, while coping with the decline of her mother and feared estrangement from her daughter.  Juggling her time between the movie set, the hospital and the home, the doubt-racked Margherita drops in and out of focus, the film’s fluid timeline mirroring the watery ebb and flow of her dreams, memories and experiences.  Meanwhile, her brother Giovanni, significantly sidelining his own on-screen presence, simply steps away from work, taking a leave of absence to attend too his mother, but also to tend his own emotional wounds.

“… there are belly laughs to be had, thanks largely to John Turturro in a spectacularly self-deprecating turn as fading American-Italian screen star Barry Huggins. Full of shouty stories about working with Kubrick (despite never actually appearing in his movies), Huggins is a class-A clown, unable to remember his lines, ill-versed in Italian pronunciation, and incapable of acting and driving at the same time – or maybe even separately.  In ‘Noi Siamo qui’ he plays the hateful boss firing factory workers, but can Margherita get through the shoot without giving him his own marching orders?  Never vain, Turturro relishes the opportunity to make a splendid mockery of his screen cachet (bringing international sales clout to both the real and fictional films), prattling about the itchiness of his moustache, praising and damning his director with equal vacuity.  All the more poignant, then, to realise that the belligerent Barry, like the adored Ada, suffers from a failure of memory – that his flaws are also a result of frailty.

“As for Margherita, her own shows of strength (her ex-boyfriend accuses her of emotional cruelty) fall apart as her mother’s health fails, her on-set judgment increasingly clouded by the more significant dramas playing out within her family.  There’s something very pointed about the dogmatic sturdiness of the film she’s working on while her personal life is in flux – as if order can only exist in stories.  Well-rehearsed platitudes about audiences wanting something more than mere entertainment unravel as Margherita becomes her own harshest critic, her insistence that actors should “stand next to” their character (a Morettian tic) proving as baffling to her cast as the doctors’ diagnoses are to her.
“Moretti has said that he avoided watching Michael Haneke’s AMOUR while preparing MIA MADRE, and it’s perhaps more helpful to think of Bergman or Woody Allen (he watched ANOTHER WOMAN) as possible tonal touchstones, although the latter comparison is arguably less a blessing than a curse. With precisely chosen music by, among others, Arvo Pärt and Jarvis Cocker, this is Moretti at his interpersonal best: intimate, emphatic and intensely humane.”

Hopefully, CFC members and guests will find this film equally enjoyable.

We always welcome audience comments on the firms we have shown. Please join the debate here.

Shots from "Mia Madre"Selected UK reviews:

Sight and Sound (Geoff Andrew)
Observer (Mark Kermode)