No one who has lived their entire life in a country can fully understand the strange and intimate turmoil of immigration as a family. For a time, parents and children united and equal in confusion, adult authority hangs as all sides wander and stumble their way through new cultures, geographies, and social circles – a common rite of passage, cutting apart decades. Eventually, everyone finds their feet, traditional roles are reasserted, and stable family life resumes—except when it doesn’t, as shown in Léonor Serraille’s second sensitive but agonizing feature, “Mother and Son.” An unemotional yet sad portrait of a difficult single mother and two vulnerable sons settling (or not settling) in France from Ivory Coast, showing how the experience of immigrants can tighten, or permanently break, the knot between parent and child.
Uncompromisingly ambitious, dramatized vividly and poetically in three time columns over 20 years, this is a confident progression for Cyrael from her 2017 debut “Jeune Femme.” This highly charismatic single-person study won the Camera d’Or at Cannes, and was driven by a vibrant, untidy feminist movement in the spirit of Phoebe Waller-Bridge or Lena Dunham. Mother and Son retains this quality in its complex and imperfect protagonist—performed by Annabelle Lingron—albeit her social outlook is more inclusive and broad: Inspired by the life and roots of the father of her children, Cyrael’s original screenplay includes an implicit patriotic-socioeconomic scale of comment in his story. Intimate domesticity, though he cleverly avoids making blunt codes for his sharp and specific personalities.
In particular, Thirty Something Rose (Lengronne) is presented not as any kind of maternal martyr figure, but as a turbulent, funny and incompletely discredited woman to match the heroine of “Jeune Femme”. (This movie’s star, Letitia Doche, returns in passing here in a modest cameo.) Tell us the minimal backstory and circumstances that led the independent-minded Rose to leave her home in Abidjan for Paris in the late 1980s, with her adult sons Jean (Sir Vodana) 10-year-old, and 5-year-old Ernest (Milan Ducanci). It is clear that she is seeking a better life for her children than the one that drove her to this decision.
As a playful and cuddly parent, she also doesn’t skimp on putting herself first from time to time, especially when that serves her fun-loving nature and healthy libido. But Jan and Ernst deal the punches, as the former doubles as a dutiful guardian for his younger brother when Rose’s job servicing hotels and night exploits demands him; Less tolerant are married relatives (Audrey Kwaku and Etienne Minongo) who put the family in their already cramped social apartment on the outskirts of Paris. When Rose enters into an affair with married Frenchman Thierry (Thébout Everr), and is offered to move the family to his hometown of Rouen, she jumps at the chance to escape; Being a supported mistress, she believes, still offers better prospects than her fellow émigrés (notably the beloved magician Jules Cesar, played by Jean-Christophe Foley) in Paris.
Inevitably, none of this works out too perfectly, which we imagine because the narrative leaps forward in two stages, at a rate of about a decade at a time—the guiding perspective shifted from Rose to Jean (played by rising star Stefan at 19-year-old Buck) , and finally to Ernst (Kenzo Sampen, and later Ahmed Sylla). (The film’s French title, “Un petit frère,” which translates to “A Little Brother,” gives a more subtle sense of the film’s point.) It’s simple, graceful structure requires viewers to continue to get to know the characters, and their fragile and evolving relationship with one another. The boys, with varying successes, seek to plant roots in the land they now know as their home, where their home recedes in both their memory and their souls–even like their white peers, brazenly you don’t think, constantly asking where they are from. For Rose, meanwhile, a tangible sense of belonging eludes her as she navigates home, jobs, and relationships, while her primary identity as a mother is diminished by the sons’ distance from her.
It’s an inevitable progression, for both the characters and the movie, although it’s hard not to miss the lively, salty, and smoldering energy of Lengronne’s great performance when he’s no longer driving the actions after the first third. This is not slight to the unaffected young performers, who play Jan and Ernst at various stages, although the fickle and recessive nature of these young men as they mature is reflected in the film’s heightened emotional reserve and penetrating, melancholy skin.
Serraille filmmaking, more sober and restrained than ‘Jeune Femme’, is at the same temperature, with Hélène Louvart’s beautifully uncomfortable lens never allowing compositional beauty to overcome weathering, changing faces at the center of the shots. And there may be no more vulgar or deeply poignant image in the film than a pile of Tupperware containers, filled with spills of carefully-cooked mother’s soup and rice, pulled from a carry-on bag as a peace offering to a quietly untied child. – The taste of home, although not recognized as such.
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