The Incomplete and The Intimate

Ma Mere 

Dir. Christophe Honore’, 2004

Eroticism is a backdrop for the larger questions about who we are and what we are to challenge what Christophe Honore’ calls the moral straitjacket, the bourgeois tendencies of consumption, excess, and frivolity, the lack of depth in an empty life of human tourism that evades intimacy and engagement.

Isabelle Huppert and Louis Garrell’s staggering and poetic performances intensify Christophe Honore’ ’s contemporized adaptation of Georges Bataille’s story, “Ma Mere” set in the Euro-tourist-haven of the Canary Islands instead of a 1900’s brothel. Intimacy, incompleteness, and impurity are its underlying themes as the film travels society’s taboos, excess, consumptive desire in relation to being, presence/absence, and exchange. Relationships are ritualized to illustrate there is something beyond pleasure: tenderness, kindness, and humanity. The subtext is a coming of age paired with a reckoning with mortality, an accounting of collective complicity and corruptibility, triumph in failure, and weakness as strength. Clichés and conventions of all kinds literary and visual, moral and physical are inverted and subverted; all relationships and their proper order are transgressed and stripped bare from pretense, praise and all socially acceptable gloss.

The film is a kind of modern fairy tale with villains, heroes, innocent children, wicked parents, witches, fairies, and trolls in which Honore’ reflects back “our desire reduces us to weakness”, and that we think we know or assume can be crushed by what is.  We can be reborn more honest, frank, and raw, and perhaps, then, more able to really experience the experience we are experiencing. We can mess with the edges and precipices of a vertiginous existence, and feel vertigo and nausea, and then, we are ripe, available and can really experience deep empathy and compassion for one another. If we remove our mask are we more naked; what if we wear a mask and play our role as if our life depended on it.

The fragmenting of the body through edits, framing, bondage, wrapping, wounding, bathing, clothing, and nakedness in relation to clothing raise these questions visually, viscerally, and we are confronting our own squeamishness, our own desire, and our own failings as human beings, as lovers, as corresponding beings, and must examine our own responsibilities, our shortcomings, our failings as we witness those of others especially ones we love. One has to “go a little far”, one has the choice to terrorize or bless another. We are both animal and other. In true Bataille fashion, we must face the abject and its is there where we find beauty. “The origin of the world is the hole,” says La Mere’s lover-collaboratrice, Rea, played by actress Emma de Cannes. What we fear must become what we desire and love. We must embrace what we loath, and find intimacy there. For perhaps, what we loath the most is ourselves, and therefore life itself, and that is our true crime, and our daily death.

The privileged couple, their son, and their odd mix of friends, who are mostly pretty young girl-and boy-nymphs with lots of free time, avoid hordes of overweight Northern Europeans in white socks and sandals, random naked men with piercings in sensitive places, or unkempt boisterous American youths; they retire from the clubs, bars, and streets with an occasional pause to make love in a public place or taxi to their own posh villa with endless views from the swimming pool and patios to unmade beds where they frolic, violate one another, and repeatedly revive and give birth to experiences of Bataille’s theories of the erotic, existence, and liberty.

Pierre, dark eyed and lanky, is a handsome, moody boy who returns to his parent’s villa for a vacation. Upon his arrival his cryptic father speaks in premonitory codes about his mother and the masks they both wear, while La Mere, played by the stunning Huppert, exhibits her destructive ambivalence and insatiable hungers through restless fawning, fidgeting, and a string of sexual encounters, entrances and exits, which are essential to advance the metaphysics of sex, the  examination of our sexual taboos and prejudices, and how social structures damage and cut away at our being, depriving us of life, suffocating our spirit, and destroying any real exchange and reciprocity.  La Mere’s physical absence from the film for about a half hour marks Pierre’s need to find and make his own way, learn from the abandonment and separation about true union and being, and loosen the knotted ties to his mother. He is forced to journey through his mother’s identity, roles, and doings without her, and she is unable to defend her actions and their injustice. This black hole, as Honore’  describes it, alludes to the necessary demise of La Mere’s desire, and the implications and consequences of that.

La Mere is unwell after a bad fall, and laid in bed, shrouded in a white sheet like Mantegna’s “Dead Christ”, her feet exposed, her body and face recede in an acute foreshortening of the body wrapped as one form. Feet and toes become unwieldy appendages going off in various directions.  Her covered horizontality, her fall from grace and desire will become the death she will wear. For Bataille, the feet represent our contact with dirt, our destined fate to be attached to the ground, and our baseness as beings on the earth.  The pairing of the a promiscuous mother with the figure of Christ is not gratuitously irreverent or to shock, but rather serves to demystify the roles, which are interchangeable and undress our costuming and perfuming of that which is foul about us, inevitable, the corpse and tragedy that we are. She, La Mere, is both a scapegoat and a villain, guilty of what it is to be human and mortal, a sinner and saint, a mother and woman; she embodies the extremes we are, lives all that we are capable of. Her beauty becomes her ugliness and vice versa; her sexuality’s sovereignty becomes simultaneous poisonous death and health. Boundaries of opposites and dualities as posited by our social structures are blurred, they willingly pair, bond, and multiply through her. She breeds and evokes love, hatred, empathy, compassion, and embodies the pathos, frailty, horror, and tenderness of humanity.

Religion attempts to fill gaps of being, the unknowns and mysteries of our suffering, insatiable longing, and when it reaches beyond its dogma, teachings, and ideals, perhaps it achieves a level of humanity that is valuable.  Bataille’s own texts are filled with his own search to unravel the laws, rules, preferences to get at the origins of our social life and its constructions. This films explores much of that rich terrain, not to answer the unanswerable, but to expose its essence of unanswerability and unaccountability. Perhaps, when we unveil, unmask, and denude ourselves, we reach a truer sense of being, a more real experience of one another, and the suffering we all bear is perhaps soothed once we acknowledge the wounds we are capable of and inflict on ourselves and one another.