MikePadgett.com

Ma Mère

— Director: Christophe Honoré France, 2004 Pierre has too much time on his hands. He’s a sullen, truculent, overweaned, morbid youth who spends his inordinate amount of spare time writing miserable…”

• Director: Christophe Honoré
• France, 2004
• 

Pierre has too much time on his hands. He’s a sullen, truculent, overweaned, morbid youth who spends his inordinate amount of spare time writing miserable prose and pulling faces at his elders. Ma Mère is all about Pierre and it’s as indolent, ignorant and insolent as he is.

Based on some novel or other, the film wastes two of the slowest hours of your life playing out some Oedipus-meets-Coming-Of-Age melodrama whose shock-bore pacing sputters like some diabetic geriatrix.

And it’s the dénouement that clinches it: if it’s too hard to empathise with a mother whose jaded sexual appetite requires her to corrupt the flower of Europe’s bored, rich youth, then listless Pierre won’t score with you either, as he jacks off over her dead body in the morgue.