June 24-30, 2004

movies

Back from the Dead

LOVE AFTER DEATH: Reid and Craig pause for thought.

A widow's affair with a younger man awakens conflicting desires.

by Cindy Fuchs

What I'm interested in is minds. With sex, you are vulnerable and crazed and disrupted. — Hanif Kureishi

May (Anne Reid) lies awake just before dawn, her husband Toots (Peter Vaughan) snoring faintly beside her. In the morning, she helps him dress, ties his shoes and packs his suitcase, as they head from their suburban home into London, to spend time with children and grandchildren. Their visit is cut short when Toots suffers a heart attack and dies. Her busy, distracted son Bobby (Steven Mackintosh) brings her home, and when she rejects his suggestions to sit or take tea, he warns her, "Don't be difficult." "Why not?" she asks. "Why shouldn't I be difficult"?

In these first few minutes of The Mother, May is suddenly freed from a life spent accommodating and looking after others. Insisting that Bobby bring her back with him to London, she shuttles between his home and his sister Paula's (Cathryn Bradshaw). While the situation at Bobby's is stressful (his cashmere sales are falling off, his wife resents May's intrusion and his noisy kids barely tolerate her), Paula's is even less stable. A touchy-feely writing teacher whose students adore her, she's in a fitful relationship with Bobby's old college friend Darren (Daniel Craig). Married and apparently harried (his repeatedly referenced autistic son remains offscreen), he's a longtime carouser currently contracted to build Bobby's conservatory.

Even as May is troubled by Darren's irresponsible treatment of Paula, she also partly blames her daughter; the newly in-therapy Paula confesses after a few glasses of wine that she's always felt unloved and unappreciated. Even more complicated is May's arousal by Paula and Darren's raucous sex (after which they argue, Paula cries, and Darren stumbles back to his wife). Unmoored after years of fearful good behavior, May's unsure how to respond to her own feelings. As if she's Paula's high school girlfriend, May agrees to find out Darren's intentions: "What are you doing with Paula?" she asks point-blank. He comes back, "How can you ask that?" plainly intrigued by her honesty and naiveté. And within days, May and Darren are having rowdy afternoon sex themselves, in Bobby's sunny spare room.

While Darren may be having yet another adventure, for May, the experience is life-changing. Aside from her emotional relief ("I thought nobody would ever touch me again, apart from the undertaker"), she's enraptured by the physical sensations of unmissionary sex. Darren is adolescent and awkward: He plays air guitar, drinks and takes whatever pills he happens on (asked why, he shrugs, "I don't know"). On their first outing, shortly after Toots' death, he takes May to a cemetery, and wonders at May's confession that she feels afraid to go home and be alone: "I imagined people getting less frightened as they got older." At the same time, he attends to her, wants to please her, jokes with her and appreciates her attention as well. And it's not long before May too begins to see Darren as a savior, someone who cares for her and wants to commit, enticed at least in part by the fact that she has a bit of money saved up.

Written by Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette) and directed by Roger Michell (Notting Hill), The Mother is fraught with conflicting desires and frustrations. May's new sense of self and awakened sexuality are startling, not least to her: She scrubs Paula's floors while singing "Space Oddity" to herself, in a small, surprised voice. But she also makes sense of them, within her own experience and expectations (imagining Darren will go away with her, leaving his wife, his child, her own daughter). The film delicately reflects her shifting sensibilities, revealing her point of view (at a distance, across traffic, through doors barely opened), and framing her, as she steps forward into her own life, in doorways, windows, and mirrors. The first sex scene begins in an out-of-focus rush, set against empty walls and sheets that are almost too white, suggesting at once her self-abandonment and self-discovery.

Even as they must keep their trysts secret from her children, Darren and May also seem to beg to be found out. She leaves her drawings of their sex acts on a table to be discovered; he agrees to dinners with Paula and May, kissing Paula (or allowing himself to be kissed, ravenously, for, of course, Paula knows) as May watches, such that juggling his related lovers becomes perversely thrilling if, at the same time, nerve-racking. The wrongness of the relationships — all of them, really — has as much to do with the selfishness as the occasional generosity of the players. The film doesn't judge them so much as it lets them run amok, careening until they must collide. Still, the camera remains austere, careful. And it's this distinction, between image and act, or frame and emotion, that remains most difficult.

The Mother Directed by Roger Michell A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

4 recommended