The Mother

[drchicago]

Hi all,

I'm a newbie and my first attempt at introducing myself failed for unknown technical reasons. Meanwhile, I just saw a review for what sounds like a tasty film called The Mother, about a 60something English granny's fling with her daughter's 30something boyfriend. It has some rather steamy scenes.

From what I gather this is probably only playing in the art houses in the larger cities. I'll be sure to check it out in Chicago. (Any of you older ladies out there up for catching this flick with a 30-year-old guy who's smart, funny, handsome, likes movies, long walks, puppies, blah blah blah.....?)

p.s. No, I'm not a doctor, although I'd like to play one on TV someday.

It was in the Washington Post. Frankly, the thing that bothered me about it, is that yet again the OW is taking away the daughter's boyfriend, granted he was married. They always portray the OW as either seducing the guy or as a predator. In this case she is creeping about but with a married YM. Why can't the filmmakers get it right. Just have two average/single or div. people fall for each other? However, the good news is that the topic is tackled. And as we all know, it is nothing new...though the public might think so. Candy

Originally posted by CandyO'Reilly
It was in the Washington Post. Frankly, the thing that bothered me about it, is that yet again the OW is taking away the daughter's boyfriend, granted he was married. They always portray the OW as either seducing the guy or as a predator. In this case she is creeping about but with a married YM. Why can't the filmmakers get it right. Just have two average/single or div. people fall for each other? However, the good news is that the topic is tackled. And as we all know, it is nothing new...though the public might think so. Candy

I agree-
why can't they portray it something like,
Sleepless In Seattle maybe?

I mean afterall,
it has been known to happen in real life...
And at least it would be portrayed in a normal, happy ending type of way, rather than the sex crazed OW preying upon the innocent YM.




~Sage~

[Desert Spring]

The Mother isn't really about OW/YM relationships. It's about the price people pay when women suppress what THEY want for most of their lives and then have to face old age without having lived the life they wanted. And about how impossible it is to truly care for others when you don't take care of yourself.

The woman in the movie spent 40 years taking care of everybody but herself, and she didn't like it. When she is widowed and about to enter old age and basically being treated like a disposable half-dead rag by everyone around her, she discovers a little anger, and does a horrifically selfish thing to remind herself and everone around her that she's still alive. It's the angry act of an angry person and perhaps it sets her free and perhaps it's just a final coda in a fundamentally unhappy life. Either way, the movie isn't really about OW/YM relationships.

I liked it, BTW ......

[PinkPanther_04]

Ugh, what a tedious, boring, pointless movie. I hated every single character. They were all just selfish, spoiled brats. I didn't see any kind of message here at all. It was just a bunch of stupid people doing a bunch of stupid things and all hating each other the whole time. You can sit at home and watch "The Real World" for that.

Originally posted by Desert Spring
The Mother isn't really about OW/YM relationships. It's about the price people pay when women suppress what THEY want for most of their lives and then have to face old age without having lived the life they wanted. And about how impossible it is to truly care for others when you don't take care of yourself.
The woman in the movie spent 40 years taking care of everybody but herself, and she didn't like it. When she is widowed and about to enter old age and basically being treated like a disposable half-dead rag by everyone around her, she discovers a little anger, and does a horrifically selfish thing to remind herself and everone around her that she's still alive. It's the angry act of an angry person and perhaps it sets her free and perhaps it's just a final coda in a fundamentally unhappy life. Either way, the movie isn't really about OW/YM relationships.
I liked it, BTW ......

When I feel that way-
I eat the last of the brownies and then
grin to the kids and tell them that I did it
and that I loved each one!
Or I don't do their laundry or make them take a
bus or walk to their friends house.
When I begin feeling like a doormat around here
I have all kinds of ways to revolt and get them to see
that they are taking me for granted.
If all else fails, I'll get right in their faces and
let them know how I feel.

If I want to be set free-
I'll drive off to the beach and set my spriit free...

Doesn't sound like a film for me..



~Sage~

[~Guinavere~]

It does sound like a depressing tale, but I am a fan of movies that delve into the deeper psyche of people. So I will give it a chance. It hasn't opened here in Melbourne cinema yet, but I have been offered a free pass to go to the premiere tonight. I will give you my thoughts tomorrow on it.

Adri and I are going together and having a girl's night out.

[Desert Spring]

Here's something about the guy who wrote the movie screenplay:

(just to add to the conversation)
--------------------------------------------
Hanif Kureishi used to know who his readers were. They were "hip young kids", riding the tube, reading The Buddha of Suburbia, his novel about sex, drugs and race in 70s south London. When the book came out in 1990, he was a rebel hero and 13 years on,, Kureishi retains the air of a man slightly too cool for his surroundings. Now 48 and smoothly turned out, he sits on a sofa in his publicist's office, legs akimbo, and observes the world with imperious ease. He has written a film, The Mother, about the sex life of a woman approaching 70. "I can't imagine hip young kids queueing at the Odeon to see a film about an old girl," he says laconically. "I don't really care. I didn't write it because I thought it would make me a rich man. I wrote it because I was interested in it."

Kureishi's interest is in the invisible, the people in the margins - signified in The Mother by a shapeless, snot-coloured coat worn by Anne Reid, a 68-year-old actor best known for her role in Victoria Wood's TV series Dinner Ladies. When I saw The Mother in the cinema, Reid's sex scenes with 35-year-old co-star Daniel Craig drove people inside their own polo-necks with discomfort. "Yuh," says Kureishi. "In the cinema in Cannes, there was a young woman sitting near me and when the old woman started having sex, she covered her eyes. She was appalled. The idea of an older woman having sex does not go down well with people. It's shocking. Our mothers aren't supposed to be sexual; their bodies belong to us."

Sex is never easy in Kureishi's world. He wrote of a gay, mixed-race affair in his film My Beautiful Laundrette, of sex for hire in Suburbia, and then in his novel Intimacy about a man falling out of love with his partner. "Well," says Kureishi, "I think when you're writing, you look for the bits that are difficult. They're the exciting bits. You look for conflict. When you're writing you're aware that when you stop, at that moment it's an act of censorship. If you think, 'I shouldn't say that,' it's always the things you should say."

Kureishi grew up in the suburbs, in Bromley, south London, where people didn't speak their desire, but bottled it up until they were puce in the face and miserable. His father was Indian, his mother English. Bromley was very white in the 1960s and 70s. The whole family stood out. I wonder if he thinks Britain has become less racist since then. "Well, when I was a kid," says Kureishi, "the racism was sort of casual. You'd go down the street and people would say things to you all the time. And at school, everybody would be racist in a way they wouldn't be now. On the other hand, the way my window cleaner talks about asylum seekers - 'these ******* asylum seekers, they come over here taking our jobs' - is exactly the same as what people said about Pakis when I was a kid. You just realise that the focus has changed. I think racism is where people talk about what they hate about themselves: greedy, money-grabbing, it's the same vocabulary that applies to the Jews, the blacks, the asylum seekers, the Pakistanis and the Irish."

Kureishi was in a pub in Hastings during the England-Turkey football match earlier this year, when everyone started chanting, "I'd rather be a Paki than a Turk." It surprised him. "I thought, they wouldn't sing that in London. I don't think London bears any resemblance to England. It's a right crummy place without London. I think if England didn't have London, it'd be a ******* dump."

Kureishi's mum is still in Bromley; his father died several years ago. Has his mum seen The Mother, I wonder? "Yes. She loved it. She kept saying: am I going to be shocked by it? Will I have to cover my eyes? Eventually she saw it, and she was relieved that it didn't seem to be about her. Which it isn't."

Does he ever worry about the ideas drying up? "No. I don't see why they should." I'm at home with my missus, at home with my kids, I'm at home like other people in the street, and they go, you're just at home but, ******* hell, what do you think it's like in my kitchen? It's a crucible in there, it's an emotional crucible. Kids are screaming, the wife's going, why don't you do that? People think, this guy hasn't left the house for five years, but in the house it's hot. That's what you look for."

There is a price to pay for using one's own hot-house as material, as Kureishi has found out. But, he says, "It's better to speak, in my view, than to shut up. It seems to me that if you speak - that's what The Mother does - she speaks her desire, I guess, and there's hell to pay. But in a sense she's more alive because of it."

[~Guinavere~]

Originally posted by Desert Spring
Here's something about the guy who wrote the movie screenplay:

(just to add to the conversation)
--------------------------------------------

Kureishi's interest is in the invisible, the people in the margins - signified in The Mother by a shapeless, snot-coloured coat worn by Anne Reid, a 68-year-old actor best known for her role in Victoria Wood's TV series Dinner Ladies. When I saw The Mother in the cinema, Reid's sex scenes with 35-year-old co-star Daniel Craig drove people inside their own polo-necks with discomfort. "Yuh," says Kureishi. "In the cinema in Cannes, there was a young woman sitting near me and when the old woman started having sex, she covered her eyes. She was appalled. The idea of an older woman having sex does not go down well with people. It's shocking. Our mothers aren't supposed to be sexual; their bodies belong to us."

Yep, I had the same experience with a young woman sitting next to me in the cinema. At the first sign of a sexual encounter, she covered her eyes, and then later in the movie with a scene between May and an older man, she sat up and looked at me and said "EEW, that's disgusting!"

BTW...I absolutely loved the movie! I saw it on Saturday evening with my friend "Adri" and then saw it again on Sunday with my husband.

It is not about an OW/YM relationship.


"The Mother isn't really about OW/YM relationships. It's about the price people pay when women suppress what THEY want for most of their lives and then have to face old age without having lived the life they wanted. And about how impossible it is to truly care for others when you don't take care of yourself."--Desert Spring



Desert you are right about that.

I could relate to this woman in a lot of ways. Having married young, and then proceeding to lose myself in the process of birthing and raising children and taking care of a husband who suffered from a debillitating illness for almost 25 years, I was able to understand the "psychological death" of May. She is a woman who after spending most of her life taking care of others and neglecting herself, now tries to find a way to "breathe" again. She has a daughter (Paula) who is a selfish brat who has gone through life blaming her mother for all the woes she has faced. Never once does she take responsiblity for her circumstances. At one point in the movie I just said out loud...Get over it!

May has a son (Bobby) who is a workaholic so he doesn't have to deal with the everyday humdrum of being a husband and father. He doesn't even know what to do when his father comes to him complaining of chest pains. He calls for his mother to come down and take care of it.

And then there is Darrin (the lover, and in my opinion a central character in the lives of everybody) who seems to understand May when no one else truly sees what she is trying to accomplish.
Darrin is not the nicest of characters, but he is raw and honest.

I have never been one to read a review and embrace it as gospel without having seen the film for myself. I think that is unfair to the film maker. And more times than not, I have liked the film in spite of the "bad" review. Such was the case with this film

[~Guinavere~]

Film puts a twist on the idea of mother love

By Ty Burr, Globe Staff
Boston Globe
Published: 06/04/2004

"The Mother" -- the film itself -- is a far more troubling piece of work that addresses the inner life of an unnoticed woman and the damage wrought when she takes it upon herself, at long last, to be noticed. Written by the gifted British novelist-screenwriter Hanif Kureishi ("My Beautiful Laundrette") and directed by Roger Michell ("Persuasion," "Notting Hill"), it's an awkward, discomfiting film, at times floridly melodramatic, at others downright gamy, and yet it gets at truths of human behavior that few movies think to touch. I saw it two weeks ago and I haven't stopped turning it over in my mind since.

"The Mother," in other words, only looks middlebrow. In reality, it's messy in the way that life is, and with a rare and welcome obstreperousness. "Don't be difficult, mother," says Paula at one point, and you can see the curious jolt of discovery in May's eyes as she looks up and answers, for the first time in her life, "Why not?"


__________________________________________________ __

New York Times, Stephen Holden
"...extraordinarily clear-sighted drama..."

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San Francisco Chronicle, Ruthe Stein
"...commendably original..."

The Washington Post, "Style," section C, June 25, 2004 said," 'The Mother': Veins of Truth Under a Parchment Skin...[had ]brilliant performances...[but was] excruciating...appalling...twisted...and heavy on truth."
They are talking about us again, Girls.