Showing at Cannes Film Festival

There's a film screening at Cannes today called "The Mother".

It has an OW/YM theme!

The Mother - SYNOPSIS
Directed by: Roger Michell
Cast: Anne Reid, Daniel Craig
Anne Reid stars as May, an ordinary grandmother from the North of England. When her husband dies on a family visit to London, she recedes into the background of her busy, metropolitan children's lives. Stuck in an unfamiliar city, far from home, May fears that she has become another invisible old lady whose life is more or less over. Until, that is, she embarks on a passionate affair with Darren (Daniel Craig), a man half her age who is renovating her son's house and sleeping with her daughter.


STRAPLINE - "It can take a lifetime to feel alive".

Cannes 2003: Film reviews
British cinema seems to be becoming less ageist by the minute. After the success of the rumbustious Calendar Girls, in which middle-aged Yorkshire women pose nude for a WI calendar, comes Roger Michell and Hanif Kureishi's The Mother , in which an ageing widow seduces her daughter's lover. This is an intense and well-made drama that was received with acclaim at its world premiere in the Directors' Fortnight.

Any resemblance to Michell's Notting Hill is swept away in the first few minutes as May and Toots, a couple in their 60s, travel warily south to visit their grandchildren in London. When Toots (Peter Vaughan) dies of a heart attack, May (Anne Reid) is left pondering the loss of a man with whom she has lived only half a life. Her neurotic daughter (Cathryn Bradshaw) is too busy fighting to keep her married lover (Daniel Craig) to offer much support. He represents everything Toots was not; accordingly, May seduces him. But what follows hardly constitutes the material for a feelgood conclusion. Any laughter at her temerity is dampened by Reid's performance, in which May's desperation to get a life and the honesty of her desire is laid before us without histrionics.

Precise direction and cinematography from Alwin Kuchler add to one's pleasure. And the writing shows that Kureishi has reached a new level - not of virtuosity, but of humanity. This is a film that is not only perceptive, but warm too.