A dysfunctional family memoir that turns into a confrontational therapy session, Keeping Mum is French actor and documentary maker Émilie Brisavoine’s long-gestating second feature. In style and theme, it feels like a loose sequel to her well-received Cannes debut, Oh La La Pauline! (2015), a visceral and intimate portrait of her half-sister. Now the director turns her unflinching gaze on her own mother Meaud, a fearsome force of nature with a fondness for salty language and explosive “drag queen” tantrums.
There are decades of unresolved tensions simmering away between mother and daughter in Keeping Mum, which make this Karlovy Vary world premiere almost uncomfortably voyeuristic and a little too self-indulgent in places. All the same, a compelling mix of real-life soap-opera melodrama, universally relatable emotions and eye-catching collage visuals should help secure further festival bookings and potential wider audience interest.
Brisavoine began work on Keeping Mum after becoming a mother herself, claiming the experience churned up decades of buried resentment towards the woman who gave birth to her but rejected her soon afterwards. The eccentric but kindly grandmother seen on screen here, the director warns us, is far from the whole picture. Meaud was a punky bohemian party animal in her youth, and remains a charismatic presence on screen today, though her thin-skinned narcissism and short fuse are abundantly evident too. As a young divorcee, she abadoned her first two children, Brisavoine and her brother Florian, only to raise three more in her next marriage. The director began this exploratory film with vague intentions, but it became a truth and justice campaign. She is seeking some kind of reckoning, a public admission of guilt, an apology for the pain that she and her brother still carry around today.
Brisavoine assembles Keeping Mum in an agreeably freewheeling style, cross-cutting between past and present, recently shot footage and archive material, text messages, scratchy old home videos, Skype calls with Florian, and more, often using multi-screen montages. A strong recurring thread in this time-jumping pile-up of images is the director’s teenage diary entries, which are full of frank and poignant accounts of her mother’s cruel behaviour. As a witty framing device, Brisavoine repeatedly weaves in vintage clips from a TV science show about the cosmos, a metaphor for all the dark matter in her family’s bruising back story, an inner-space odyssey to understand the Big Bang moment that blew everything apart.
When it comes to challenging her hot-tempered mother over her past failings, Brisavoine is understandably wary. Even as the pair make warm conversation on camera, the director berates herself in a comically self-critical off-screen voice-over. “Enough of this bullshit and cowardice,” she fumes. Once she finally plucks up the courage to confront Meaud, her reaction is predictably explosive. “You pass me off as Queen Bitch who hurt her kids!” the mother rages, shutting down the interview. “I won’t go on camera! Get fucked, all of you!” There are pleasing echoes here of Maurice Pialat’s classic, brutal family psychodrama A Nos Amours (1983).
But for all Brisavoine’s pent-up rage and passive-aggressive tactics, Keeping Mum is not a sustained character assassination. She shows empathy towards her mother’s own challenges and struggles, from the crushing divorce which left her anorexic and suicidal to more recent, mundane, domestic problems. The dutiful daughter seems more like a parent in these scenes, while her mother plays the more childlike role. Without getting into spoilers, there is no real closure here, for protagonists or viewers alike. Instead, Brisavoine has to console herself with self-care, forgiveness and extensive New Age therapy, some of which she includes on screen. More temporary ceasefire than full peace agreement, this is a muddy conclusion to a messy film, not wholly satisfactory but still plausibly human. The primal wound remains. The resolution will not be televised.
Director, screenwriter: Émilie Brisavoine
Cinematography: Émilie Brisavoine, Tom Harari
Editing: Karen Benaïnous
Producer: Nicolas Anthomé
Music: Benoît Daniel
Production company: Bathysphere Productions (France)
World sales: Best Friend Forever
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Proxima Competition)
In French
80 minutes
