[teh b0lly!!1]

Mother!


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man.
it's been a while since i've done this. i hope this is going to make sense.

this film honestly wrecked me in a way very few ever did.

i had been a fan of Darren Aronofsky's films for a while (even though i still have a few gaps to fill), and they are kind of notorious for always being so intense and leaving you absolutely drained, in a way that very few filmmakers are not only achieve, but even aspire to at all. it's not always necessarily the best thing; sometimes you can tell a story without rattling the viewer and making them feel like shit for three weeks afterwards. and besides - versatility is always a good thing for an artist to have. but anyway, i knew nothing of the movie prior to watching, except it's an Aronofsky film and somewhat horror inclined. and that has served me incredibly well.

one funny thing about it, is that knowing nothing about it - about 20 minutes in, i was hating it and thought it was going to be terrible and "oh my god he's totally lost it" and i figured i was going to hatewatch it and then make a bunch of jokes about how terrible it is, similarly to The Invitation or something. it starts out with a beaten horror narrative so familiar and cliche'd - i was honestly mindblown when it started going surreal and turning itself around. i mean, just look at the outline for the first 20 mins or so: a troubled couple lives in an old victorian-esque house, something is obviously damaged beneath the tranquil surface, oh look at that - now she's looking for him and he's nowhere to be found, only to show up right behind her, "Oh! You scared me..!"... and then a fucking creepy ass stranger knocks on the door, and their lives are going to change forever. barf.

but then, slowly it begins to morph into this most amazing vivid, detailed nightmare, that you slowly come to realize is not even based or rooted in reality at all, but rather is purely dreamscape. it gets incredibly tactile in its imagery and metaphor, in ways that even the greatest masters of the surreal genre that i know of very seldom achieved in cinema, at least imho. during the course of the film, i thought to myself more than once that this film achieves that elusive cerebral, fucked up, lucid quality of a real suffocating and inescapable nightmare better than pretty much any David Lynch effort i'd ever watched - and he dedicated his entire life to that. not that i'm setting out to make outrageous comparisons here, i love David Lynch's work as well, but my point is - this is such a beautiful take on visualizing and outlining and producing a truly haunting dream that almost passes for reality, until more and more increasingly weird things start happening.

Jennifer Lawrence is so great in this. which came as a huge surprise to me, because her acting that i'd seen so far have always been these easy "show up on set" type of roles, that certainly don't demand any acting prowess at all. yeah, she was cool as Mystique in the X-Men's, and in American Hustle, but i really never gave her any credit or respect as an actress. well, i was 100% wrong on that. she is terrific here, and so bare bones; she's translucent, and pure, and beautiful (both in appearance and substance), and brings this warm, accommodating, loving, accepting quality to the role that is just so god damn profound. this is a film so esoteric and weird, and she just Got It completely and seized it and is absolutely largely responsible for making it what it is. for mere comparison - Michelle Pfieffer, who also appears in this film, and even does a pretty good job, has said that she read the script and didn't really get it at all - but she came on board because she liked the character she was going to play (which is a giant rude bitch from hell, btw). the small (read: vast) difference.

like Javier Bardem's character says at some point through the film, finally finding inspiration after suffering severe writer's block: "now i know what to say - i just have to find the words". that's precisely what separates Pfieffer's solid performance, from Lawrence's stellar performance - that sense of intent, of understanding deeply what it is that you need to do, and then setting out to achieve it (as opposed to reaching in the dark until "something feels right"). she's completely inspired in this role, and she absolutely killed it. and funnily, only after respecting her so much in this film, i developed a proper crush on her, and now see her incredible beauty. (if you asked me before it'd be 2/10 would not bang and that's if i'm in a good mood, YESSIR)

the whole film revolves around her - not only figuratively but also literally, as the camera frequently follows her around from behind, whooshes and circles around her, and 'acts' almost as much as she is - expressing her emotions. it all induces a wonderfully claustrophobic effect, and the film paces itself so well that it sneaks up on you and pulls you in, inch by inch, until by the end of the film where the house turns into a warzone it gets so fucking hectic i felt like i could hardly breathe.

in terms of production values, it looks and sounds great (for the most part, save for some really annoying stupid cliche sound effects that i could murder the sound guy for using), but something i really admired and liked a lot is that everything is gorgeously understated, and almost nothing ever attracts attention to itself, singularly. this entire piece as a whole, is focused on the one goal of conveying an experience, a range of emotions, and nothing stands out so much, as everything is simply really top-class: the unpredictability in which events follow, the little disturbing things that keep on happening and express anguish and turmoil (rather than try to dumbly "scare" you), the camera work, the coloring, the casting. it's all great, but conducts itself differently to other films, in that it all takes the backseat to the experience, rather than become a feature (even though the amount of thought, effort and professionalism that went into making it like that, could have obviously generated a much more "showy" picture).

yesterday, right after watching the film, i posted that imho the film speaks about so many different things, and with such incredible impact, that it's nearly impossible to pinpoint what it's really fully "about" for the better part of the film. while reading about the film later, i found this statement released by Aronofsky himself a week before the premier. i know adding a long text to an already overlong review is exhausting (buttcanon would commit suicide if he saw this), but it's worth the read, if only for the bolded part:

"It is a mad time to be alive. As the world population nears 8 billion we face issues too serious to fathom: ecosystems collapse as we witness extinction at an unprecedented rate; migrant crises disrupt governments; a seemingly schizophrenic US helps broker a landmark climate treaty and months later withdraws; ancient tribal disputes and beliefs continue to drive war and division; the largest iceberg ever recorded breaks off an Antarctic ice shelf and drifts out to sea. At the same time we face issues too ridiculous to comprehend: in South America, tourists twice kill rare baby dolphins that washed ashore, suffocating them in a frenzy of selfies; politics resembles sporting events; people still starve to death while others can order any meat they desire. As a species our footprint is perilously unsustainable yet we live in a state of denial about the outlook for our planet and our place on it. From this primordial soup of angst and helplessness, I woke up one morning and this movie poured out of me like a fever dream. All of my previous films gestated with me for many years but I wrote the first draft of Mother! (2017) in 5 days. Within a year we were rolling cameras. And now two years later, it is an honor to return to the Lido for the world premiere. I imagine people may ask why the film has such a dark vision. Hubert Selby Jr., the author of Requiem for a Dream (2000), taught me that through staring into the darkest parts of ourselves is where we find the light. "Mother!" begins as a chamber story about a marriage. At the center is a woman who is asked to give and give and give until she can give nothing more. Eventually, the chamber story can't contain the pressure boiling inside. It becomes something else which is hard to explain or describe. I can't fully pinpoint where this film all came from. Some came from the headlines we face every second of every day, some came from the endless buzzing of notifications on our smartphones, some came from living through the blackout of Hurricane Sandy in downtown Manhattan, some came from my heart, some from my gut. Collectively it's a recipe I won't ever be able to reproduce, but I do know this serving is best drunk as a single dose in a shot glass. Knock it back. Salute!"

i really love those moments of reading online about works i like, and finding these small quotes by the artist that confirm to me something i thought or understood from their work. it's the best sense of gratification, almost like communicating with them. but autofellatio aside, it provided weight and substance for what i'd seen and experienced in the film, because now i knew it wasn't just my own private set of associations or imagination - it really was put there for me (and others) to find.

reading the wiki page, i see people are fumbling with the biblical themes of the film, but to me all that stuff (though true) is marginal to the real heart of the matter. which is, that this is perhaps the most aggressively unrefined personal film i'd ever seen in my life. it digs deep and comes out with both beautiful and ugly things, and it takes a lot of guts to create something like this, something so brutally honest. i felt like i was being spoken to, like i was listening to somebody tell me about their life, in such a way that it wrenched my stomach and made me see the similarities with my own life, and mistakes i'd made that he's talking about. last film that kinda made me feel like that, like the film itself was a personal creative medium for voicing an artist's agenda, was Melancholia by Lars Von Trier, and it is LIGHTYEARS behind this one in every conceivable way.

it's just so awe-inspiringly artful in that. it deals with so many things at once: the infinite internal battle that every anxious person knows, between trying to be good and giving and selfless, and where the line draws between that and being weak, and a pushover, and reliant on others through various forms of avoidance, instead of seizing responsibility for your own life and destiny. or, the self centered-ness of people who consider themselves 'beautiful artists', and how shallow and abusive and rooted in selfishness that martyrdom is.

it talks about how it is the nature of humans to take, and take, and take, and spin the wheels so ferociously until they inevitably come off the hinges, with anything; and that the reasons for the despicable brand of tourism that i'd seen everywhere in Thailand, are the same reasons for people sitting on the unbraced sink in the kitchen in the film, and swarming into the house like insects into a rotting skull, and stealing things from the house to prove/remember they were there. the "commercialization" process of the small, intimate initial interaction between Javier Bardem and Ed Harris' characters is so brilliant and representative of everything that's wrong with tourism and capitalism in general, in this day and age.

naturally, that same commentary is equally true towards environmentalism, and what being human means to the beautiful, motherly planet we live in and destroy mercilessly each and every passing day. and on top of all that stuff there's also commentary on religion, on relationships, on selfishness, on real love and heartbreaking devotion, on self actualization, so many other things. and it's all so surreal, so left of center, yet so accurate and clear. i bet most dumb motherfuckers who watched it didn't even understand what the fuck they were seeing, which is why this movie (and Lawrence) got nominated for Razzi awards - a fact that's absolutely beyond my comprehension. but the commentary this film manages to make in such a profound way, on so many different things, on so many levels, through this bizarre branch of dreamscape imagery, really is massively inspiring, artful and rare.

i watched it last night and my thoughts are still racing through it, and in many ways i'm still experiencing it. it should be said that the film is not "perfect", whatever that means; like i said before, it starts off very awkwardly, and near the end as well, it kinda drags and keeps traumatizing the viewers incessantly, and i thought to myself at a few points that it could have probably lost like 15-20 minutes of screentime and come out better. but upon completing it, i say fuck all that. i think it IS in fact, "perfect"; because what makes it perfect is the fact it was allowed to be what it needed to be. it's so stream-of-consciousness, it couldn't and shouldn't be deconstructed or overworked and labored. it's like a fresh song recorded live in the studio - it has a few less than perfect sections or bars, but you couldn't take them out because the compounding effect of everything combined, brings you exactly where it should, and by the end of it you're so moved you're in tears. and that is the only thing that matters.

and again, that's another thing that made so much sense to me when i read on that Aronofsky statement that it was written in 5 days. and as he was quoted saying - "if you try to unscrew it, it falls apart. you shouldn't over-explain it". that's such a beautiful attitude towards it, and i respect him even more for just coming out with it and not trying to play off it like he's some master of mystery and riddle. he just allowed it to be what it wanted to be, and the result is wonderfully organic and real, even as somebody else's dream.

and if i'm already digging quotes out of the wiki page of the film, check out this piece: the film features no music. no score. or more accurately - a score was composed for the film, but discarded, as the silence and ambient noise were deemed more effective.

…he had spent a year writing the score for Darren Aronofsky's "Mother" and at some point realised that the film was better with no music at all. He proceeded to convince Darren to delete everything. It takes a real, selfless artist to do that. To realise the piece is better without you.

The most important part of creating art is the process, and Jóhann seemed to understand process. The score needed to be written first in order to realise that it was redundant. So in my view, Mother still has a score by Jóhann. The score is just silence... deafening, genius silence.[18]

i just fucking love this. so much. all the right considerations; no considerations, except what works best to serve the message and the piece.

it's almost hard for me to compliment Javier Bardem's performance. he's too good at making you hate him. but he did an amazing job here, as well. he's the perfect cast opposite Jennifer Lawrence's rippling, clear softness; he's large, brute, coarse, yet warm and attractive; deeply toxic and absolutely ruthless. the way he gaslights Lawrence's character throughout the film manages to be so convincing and so real, and thus incredibly offputting. i still have Lawrence's voice in my head, screaming "I gave you EVERYTHING!", before she drops the lighter. and the birth scene. or her final line: "take it". literally too many obscenely good moments to dwell on and dissect here.

there's just something about the interaction between the two of them - about how Jennifer's character completely nullifies herself for the sake of her love towards Bardem's character - that is just beyond heartbreaking. right until the very end. even during those short flashes, these tiny moments when she does speak her mind to him, or tries to reason with him, or tells him "please don't leave me" before he shoots off to the hospital after somebody was just murdered before her eyes in her house - he gives her the minimal amount of comforting affection, and then immediately breaks her heart again. and each consecutive time you can see her breaking and withering just a little more. it is literally beyond me how anybody could criticize Jennifer Lawrence's performance in this movie.

one moment in particular that was a real standout moment for me, in terms of the more subtle moments (even though this film is kind of all subtlety in many ways) and not the obvious great stuff, is how just after JL and JB make love and she gets pregnant, everything suddenly goes tranquil for a while. everything feels cleaner; like in a holiday. suddenly there's serenity and festivity in the air. their skin seems softer. you can almost smell the cake she bakes in the kitchen. there's regeneration. it's such a complete 180 from the tone in the better part of the film, and it's so perfectly done. this short, narratively brilliant shift in mood, is just a small example of why i love this film so much.

it's without a doubt one of my top movies of the past few years. it's completely of its own - original, completely unique, absolutely heart shattering, powerful in every way, almost flawlessly executed (and makes even the flaws feel alright).

i'm so grateful to have experiences like this every once in a while, still, after having watched so many films, and inevitably growing more critical. absolutely outrageous art and filmmaking that touched the core of my soul. thank you, Darren.