A mother lives quietly with her son. One day, a girl is brutally killed, and the boy is charged with the murder. Now, it's his mother's mission to prove him innocent.
15 Feb Mother (2009)
Torque Sheer
Most storytellers want to take you somewhere into the soul, but all they have to work with is the externalities, the actions of humans. You don’t have many strategies to work with. A common one is to place the examined soul in the midst of larger forces, war for instance. Then there is a certain ‘fold‘ between the inner and outer flows that when the two merge, allows us as the outer viewer to join the inner story.
Alternatively, the storyteller can have us invest in a relationship between our focus and someone else, a relationship so drawn to open a relationship with us, through which we swim into the intended world. That is what has been done here.
The ‘other‘ character is a brain damaged young adult. He is in a way a non-person, without the ability to be an agent in a story. He has no forward thrust. As it happens, he is the cause of something significant in the story without understanding. The fact that he is without story, unable to observe, changes our relationship with the usually simple narrative dynamic. We are placed between them.
This is a profoundly affecting drama as a result. Unexpected things occur, and we experience them not as we would, but as she does. Our first image of her is inexplicable, she is in a trance, dancing in a field. Only toward the end of the film do we catch up to that point, knowing the context. Something transformative has happened and when we revisit it, we see it from the inside.
Powerful filmmaking, in part because of the expert manner in which the ordinary dynamics are handled. In part, this is because the filmmaker has tricked us into investing in a way against with we have few protections.
Posted in 2011
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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