Movie Breakdown: Madre (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
The trailer for Madre makes it look like a particularly sad and beautiful film that has the potential to dip its toes into the creepier deep end. The long shots of the beach make my mouth water.
Post-Screening Ramble:
I should stop watching trailers. I won’t, but I should. Madre is a good, almost great film, about a woman (Marta Nieto) who, in a truly harrowing single opening shot, listens as her six-year old son is kidnapped. Ten years later, she’s moved to the beach in France where he disappeared, works at a tourist-trap seafood restaurant, and wanders said beach each morning and each night looking for her missing son. When she meets Jean (Jules Porier – a sort of creepy, French Timothy Chalamet), a lethargic teen visiting the beach on holiday, well, shit gets weird. Here’s the thing, if you watch trailers for Madre, it paints the relationship between Elena and Jean in an almost Hitchcockian way. It alludes to a tone of creepiness – to a twist even – that the film just doesn’t have. To watch a trailer for Madre before viewing (as I did) makes you think this is a low-key thriller. And if this is your metric for the film – how good of a low-key thriller it is – the film fails. Because it isn’t a thriller, and it isn’t creepy, but it isn’t trying to be. What Madre is trying to be – and succeeds to great effect – is an emotionally scouring film that lives on the edge of creepiness, but not the creep the trailer sells it as, but the lingering creep that comes as you watch a connection between two people stretched to the extremes. Both of the leads are fantastic in this – Nieto is clearly a broken woman who has spent ten years carefully pulling into herself while Porier plays Jean with all the dick-swinging, obnoxious confidence of youth tinged with the frantic emotional range of adolescents – and Rodrigo Sorogoyen (working from his original short film) leans into the slow sadness of the landscape and the story. Elena’s unraveling is like watching the tide go out – slow and steady and unstoppable. You watch and you watch and you watch, knowing where it probably ends, but unable to do anything about it. Madre, as a debut film and as an emotional journey, is a wonderful movie. If only it was the film they were selling it as.
One Last Thought:
I’ll say it again – the opening five minutes of this film (as Elena’s son is kidnapped while she’s talking to him on the phone) are absolutely amazing. You see the before and after of a life impacted by trauma laid out in the time it takes to brush your teeth. It’s masterful filmmaking and worth the price of admission alone.
