Léalo en español
Catalan director Mar Coll´s third feature, Mothers Don’t, which premieres
at the Locarno Film Festival, delves into the troubled waters of modern
motherhood using the narrative thread of Katixa Agirre´s absorbing
novel-memoir Las madres no.
Cinema has reinforced – and continues to do so – the double standard of
maternal versus paternal work. A father who gives attention to his
children, and does a respectable but not extraordinary paternal job, has
a film dedicated to him, as we saw in King Richard (2022). A mother
must be heroic, and even give her life, to be considered in a series
episode. Anything less than that, and she will fall into the ravine of bad
mothers, and there are many such movies. When a child dies, suspicion
of murder, or at a minimum of negligence, in movies and in real life, will
fall on the mother. The actress who embodies her in the film will be, at
least, an Oscar nominee like Meryl Streep in A Cry in the Dark (2022). It
took 35 years for it to be discovered that the dingo was the culprit and
not the mother, who on top of everything else had a quite unpleasant
personality.
Is it because no one cares about the average mother unless she is
terminally ill? Or is it, as Susan Suleiman said, because “mothers don´t
write, they are written”? One of the greatest merits of Mothers Don’t
is that it refuses, from the script to the staging, to
stigmatize a woman with doubts her own identity and motherhood. It
even avoids mentioning postpartum depression, perhaps to avoid
falling into the stereotype of women at the mercy of hormones.
Mothers Don’t is described as a thriller in the Locarno
Festival Catalog, but the narrative is much closer to drama. Maria
(Laura Weissmahr) is a young mother and award-winning novelist who
becomes obsessed with a case of infanticide in her town: Alice, a
woman her age, drowns her 10-month-old twin sons in the bathtub. It
is not a case like the one treated by Mexican director Felipe Cazals in
Los Motivos de Luz (1988): a mother who, in extreme poverty and in an
abusive relationship, kills her four children. Alice is an educated
woman, married to the father of her children – who is described by the
press as exemplary, – so the crime becomes all the more abominable,
and exerts a stronger disturbance on Maria, given the similarities in
their lives.
Katixa Agirre uses the first person in her book and carries out an
investigative, perhaps detective-like work focused on the homicidal
mother. Mar Coll rightly chooses a subjective look, and her protagonist,
whilst discovering very little about the infanticide, discovers a lot about
her own doubts. The film is intimate, empathetic with the mother –
with all mothers – who do not feel immediate connection with their
child. Maria watches the sessions of mothers who dance carrying their
baby like one who watches dancers under the spell of psychotropic
drugs. In a very physical performance, Laura Weissmahr guides us
through the rocky path of a woman in the puerperium phase who is not
ecstatic, as expected by society and her husband, and feels guilty for
not being so. But we also see that Maria is a woman capable of taking
action when necessary: there is a fight with a raven that breaks into her
apartment.
The film infects the protagonist´s melancholy and discomfort even in
moments that should be happy. The city appears gray, like the interiors
and like Maria´s mood. Local attractive locations were not
photographed. The contrast is marked when the protagonist advances
in her obsession, leaves the city without her son, and feels interested in something again, even if that something is as lurid as a murder. Then
you can almost feel the clean air of the Pyrenees, and appreciate the old and attractive buildings. Maria is tied to an obsession, but is free to
pursue it.
At the heart of the film are the doubts, widespread but unspoken, that
most of us women have: would I be a good mother, would I be capable
of neglecting my child, of harming, even killing him or her? Among the
many ways to process these doubts, Mothers Don’t use
of a subtle, non-melodramatic but serious tone is one of the best ways.
Director: Mar Coll
Screenplay: Mar Coll and Valentina Viso, based on the novel
Las Madres No by Katixa Agirre
Cast: Laura Weissmahr, Oriol Pla
Cinematography: Nilo Zimmermann
Editing: Aina Calleja
Music: Zeltia Montes
Sound: Amanda Villavieja, Elena Coderch
Producers: Sergi Casamitjana, María Zamora
Production Companies: Escándalo Films (Spain), Elástica Films (Spain)
with financing from ICAA, ICEC, 3Cat, RTVE, Movistar Plus+ and
Vodafone
International Sales: Be for films
Showcase: Locarno Film Festival 2024 (Competition)
In Spanish and Catalan
112 min.
