Mothers

Volver and Good Bye Lenin!

I went to see Baz Lurhmann’s The Great Gatsby yesterday, despite all the negative reviews from my favorite critics (see Film News).  One can always hope.  No dice.  It seems I won’t be writing a post about this disappointing movie because the critics were right.  I can only add to those reviews that what disappoints me most is that the young audiences today seem to like it so much. The comments from folks exiting the packed theatre I saw it at and the tweets my daughter has told me about would so indicate. Are we really in such an age of frivolity and superficiality that this movie that goes so only-skin-deep can be seen by youth as something worth their while, is it just that Gatsby’s parties are shown to be the 1920s version of college spring breaks, or is it the 3D?

Anyway, it frees me to write about a topic closer to my heart today, Mother’s Day here in the US.  I want to dedicate this post to films that touch on the mother /child relationship, one that has inspired volumes of poems and Mothers’ Day cards, thought quite a few less films, from how hard I had to think some up.  

Curiously enough and spanning many generations, it’s not that hard to find movies where the mother is little short of a monster: Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People, Nicole Kidman in The Others, Angela Lansbury or Meryl Streep in The Manchurian Candidate, Katherine Hepburn in Suddenly Last Summer, MoNique in Precious, Julianne Moore in The Hours…the list is long, regrettably.

Mothers seem to be more warm and loving on television than on the big screen. There are, however, many great exceptions.  Actually, by simply turning to Meryl Streep we can find enough good mother roles for the rest of Hollywood: The River Wild, Prime, Mamma Mia, It’s Complicated, The Hours, The Bridges of Madison County, A Cry in the Dark and, most notably, as the mother in the most nightmarish situation that any mother could ever find herself in Sophie’s Choice; debatable where the mom falls in Kramer vs. Kramer.

Streep in The River Wild, Sophie's Choice, Mamma Mia and The Hours

But the two movies I would like to highlight in this post, where the mother/child dyad is at the heart of the movie and which are truly great films are Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver and Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye Lenin!  Both happen to be European films, Volver from Spain and Good Bye Lenin! from Germany. Both happen to be quite dramatic but they are also comedies, where the comedic element is inserted in the most delicate of ways, sort of how it happens in life. They are excellently well directed, so much so that Good Bye Lenin! won all the most prestigious European film awards and was nominated for a Golden Globe, much like Volver.  They are, however, most memorably great because of the acting.

Volver stands on the shoulders of three fabulous Spanish Actors: Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura and Lola Dueñas. Cruz was nominated by the Academy for Best Actress for this movie and most certainly should have won (she later won for her role in Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona).  Daniel Brühl is the actor that shines in Good Bye Lenin!

Sole, Paula and Raimunda

In Volver Penélope Cruz plays Raimunda, the mother to Paula, a young woman assaulted by her step father, sister to Sole, a divorced woman who works clandestinely as a hairstylist for women, and both are daughters to Irene. The two sisters lost their parents in a fire in a village in La Mancha years ago, and their aunt still lives there and continues to speak about her sister Irene as if she were alive.  Raimunda, Paula and Sole return to their village to unravel the mystery surrounding their mother’s death, and to ultimately reconstruct the relationships between them. This very moving and at the same time suspenseful movie is all about mothers and daughters, the everyday challenges women face in a sexist society, and how they help each other and survive.

Good Bye Lenin! is also about a mother /child relationship, this time between Christiane, the devout socialist in East Germany 1989, and her son Alex, played fabulously by Daniel Brühl. Alex is one of the youth marching in an anti-Berlin Wall demonstration, when his mother sees him being dragged away by the police. She suffers an attack and enters into a coma. While Christiane is in the coma, the Wall falls and Germany changes drastically, as does the lives of her family. I won’t go further so as not to spoil the plot in this great film, but will add that Alex probably embodies the dream son, the one that any mother would hope to have. Maybe this movie is less about the mother than it is about the child, but it is still a testament to that relationship celebrated around the world on days like these.

Good Bye Lenin!

Many of the more popular Hollywood movies about good mothers for some reason tend to be about one in the dyad dying. We cry in excess watching as the mother buries her child or vice versa in movies like Steel Magnolias, Terms of Endearment, Imitation to Life, Madam X, Stepmom and many more like these. Volver and Good Bye Lenin! are refreshing, in this sense. They are movies about how deep and rewarding the relationship between a mother and her child can be, without anyone having to die in the process to prove it.