Mother !

Mother! is a very dark comedy of morals that degenerates into a surreal apocalyptic horror flick. First through hints and then increasingly explicitly, Aronofsky’s film makes it clear that we are not watching a realistic story. The idea that it will be a variation on Repulsion (1965) or Rosemary's Baby (1968), i.e. a domestic horror movie about a paranoid female protagonist, holds together for roughly the first hour. Then the film definitively abandons the moral, logical and any other norms that apply in our current world. The characters’ actions can no longer be explained based on any psychological parameter, there are no rationally legitimate relationships between events, and the laws of physics cease to apply. The subtext becomes the main text and it is impossible to come to an interpretation that is anything other than allegorical, unlike the above-mentioned Roman Polanski films, which until the end keep us in a state of uncertainty as to whether we are only watching the personified fragments of the protagonist’s disturbed mind. In attempting to come to a reading that is more grounded in reality, the film’s structure would collapse. However, Mother! does not base its narrative on uncertainty and unanswered questions. Nor does it try to encourage viewers to think about what has been left unsaid. As is his habit, Aronofsky instead shamelessly shoves his “big ideas” is our faces. Watching the film is an uncomfortable experience not because we would be groping for the message that it is conveying, but because we know (and see) more than we want. Sometimes it is necessary to attack all of the senses. Thanks to our physical attachment to the main character (the camera practically never wavers from her point of view), we sympathise with her, experience her physical suffering and understand both her growing frustration and her final act of defiance. In most of his films, Aronofsky works with a similarly aggressive visual style, for which he is often ranked among the biggest posers of contemporary American cinema, but for the first time in mother!, he clearly found appropriate material on which to use it. We can see the choice of the “story of all stories” as the basis for the narrative as a manifestation of a lack of judgment. However, we can also see it as a middle finger raised at critics who had previously blamed Aronofsky for the efforts of numerous midcult artists to address the problems of the entire universe with trite brevity. Mother! goes back to the beginning of life on Earth and, at the same time, ostentatiously flaunts its own banality. It doesn’t pretend to be high-brow art that we should long contemplate. A bit in the spirit of the “theatre of cruelty”, it is rather a naked attempt to draw attention, by any available means of expression, to the crisis in which humanity has found itself due to unjust social conditions and people’s selfishness, disinterest, hypocrisy, dismissiveness and complacency. It is a desperate and, in its ingenuousness, extraordinarily authentic cry, not a genial request. Perhaps you will find it offensive, or maybe you’ll laugh at it or it will make you sick, but it if doesn’t leave you indifferent, it has served its purpose. 90% (12/02/2018) (moins) (plus)