It wallows in repellant imagery rather than enlightening us intellectually in any serious way, and it offers no real psychological insight into the characters.
Comment
06/11/05
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Ma Mere (2005)
12
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:41
Fresh:5
Rotten:36
Average Rating:3.7/10
Consensus: Pretentious, overly perverse and dull.
Theatrical Release:May 13, 2005 Limited
Synopsis: Adapted from the provocative novel by transgressive postmodern intellectual and author Georges Bataille, MA MERE is set in the visually lush and spiritually empty tourist trap of the Canary... [More]
Starring: Louis Garrel, Isabelle Huppert, Francois Montagut, Dominique Reymond
Director: Christophe Honoré
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Reviews for Ma Mere
Respectable, tightly coiled, but ultimately unrewarding.
06/10/05
This is one movie I wouldn't want to take my mother to see (or even tell her that I saw).
06/10/05
Honore uses an ultraserious, would-be stylish approach that ultimately renders the depraved proceedings far more boring than titillating.
06/07/05
Garrel's performance here reveals Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers for the featherweight fantasy that it was. Ma Mère may appear grungier on the surface, but its themes run far deeper.
05/26/05
While attempting to be a bold examination of incest, sadomasochism and anality, Honore's adaptation of the Bataille novel instead becomes ludicrous indulgence.
05/22/05
It winds up making incest look absurdly swank.
05/19/05
Top CriticAbsurd at best, and most absurd when it's tiresomely trying to shock us.
05/17/05
Top Critic...a dispirited affair and often feels like a parody — a decidedly self-serious one — of one of Bertolucci or Pasolini’s boundary-pushing offerings from the ‘70s
05/14/05
downright silly and pretentious
05/13/05
This tale of disaffected sexual depravity is practically a parody of the worst of French filmmaking.
05/13/05
There's no attempt to get inside the sick minds of Helene and her buddies.
05/13/05
Yeah, there's tons of sex, but deep philosophical ideas also pop up.
05/13/05
Pretentious Eurotrash.
05/12/05
Top CriticMa Mere may be ludicrous, but its cast displays a commitment that deserves more than grudging admiration.
05/12/05
Top CriticBased on a novel by French provocateur Georges Bataille, an important thinker whose fiction rarely translates into good cinema.
05/12/05
Honore never gets beneath these characters' sunburned skins, and well before the end, the film tips irretrievably over into the realm of absurdity.
05/12/05
Huppert doesn't turn this object d'cypher role into exactly the sort of gay-son-as-Oedipus tribute that Dan Harris flubbed with last year's Imaginary Heroes.
05/12/05
Lurching toward its inevitable incestuous showdown, Ma Mère makes a few hilarious attempts at the cerebral.
05/10/05
This is a bold and difficult film, examining intensely personal issues and letting us in as voyeurs.
05/06/05
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