An artfully stylised hybrid documentary about maternity that distills multiple voices into a single emblematic narrator, Mother is a lightly experimental non-fiction film that falls somewhere between journalistic reportage, performance art and one woman stand-up show. It is written and directed by Carolin Schmitz, a festival veteran previously best known for her feted confessional documentary Portraits of German Alcoholics (2010).
Woven into a single stop-start monologue, Schmitz’s screenplay is a collage of quotes taken from interviews with eight anonymous women aged between 30 and 75, all relating their experiences of motherhood, good and bad, joyous and painful. These words are all spoken directly to camera by Anke Engelke, a versatile comic actor best known in Germany for TV sketch shows, as well as for voicing Marge in the locally dubbed version of The Simpsons. In this poised performance, she downplays her natural mirthful mischief to ruminate on more serious themes, embodying a kind of universal mother figure. She’s every woman, it’s all in her.
World premiering at Munich Film Festival this week, Mother scores highly for its smart general concept and strong central performance, but the fairly banal range of experiences Schmitz covers feel a little too generic to generate much buzz beyond niche documentary and festival circles. The agonising emotional extremes of motherhood barely register on these bittersweet domestic diary entries, while timely questions of unequal gender politics embedded in traditional maternal roles are only fleetingly addressed. So much remains unsaid.
Not that Mother is entirely devoid of colourful anecdotes. One of the unnamed women channeled by Engelke recalls falling pregnant to a sex addict who also bedded her own mother, another reveals the secret murderous rage she often feels towards her own children. “I sometimes go upstairs and lock myself in my room so I don’t get violent.” But most of these stories are fairly unremarkable: unfaithful spouses, the boredom of childcare, bickering over shared domestic duties, divorce, custody battles, the loneliness of an empty nest after the kids grow up and leave home. In fairness, this universality may well be Schmitz’s point, corralling a chorus of individual voices that add up to a kind of Cubist mosaic of motherhood.
As she speaks these words, Engelke’s nameless protagonist performs unrelated daily tasks with a kind of deadpan grace: cooking food in her elegant modernist home, tending to her pet rabbit, driving around the city, dancing to techno music in a bar, and so on. Apparently real snapshots of the star’s off-screen life also encroach on the action as she continues to deliver these monologues through costume fittings, hair styling appointments, and isolated scenes from a work-in-progress theatre production, which feature sporadic interjections from a male director. A fresh concept filmed with a sharp eye and a dry wit, Mother is never dull to watch, just a little too slight to leave a deep imprint. Most journeys from here to maternity contain more drama, comedy and tragedy than Schmitz delivers.
Venue: Munich Film Festival
Director, screenwriter: Carolin Schmitz
Cast: Anke Engelke
Cinematography: Reinhold Vorschneider
Editing: Stefan Oliviera-Pita, Annett Kiener
Producer: Ingmar Trost
Production company: Sutor Kolonko (Germany)
In German
85 minutes
