MY MOTHER: deeply personal and about loss

John Turturro in MY MOTHER
Margherita Buy and John Turturro in MY MOTHER

So let’s get one thing straight right up front – My Mother is NOT a dramedy.  It’s an Italian drama that is leavened with bits of comedy.  Writer-director Nanni Moretti has constructed a deeply personal portrait of a person in mid-career and mid-life who is losing her aged parent.  There’s never a convenient moment to go through this experience, and Moretti’s protagonist, a movie director (Margherita Buy), is juggling her job and her relationships with her teen daughter, her ex-husband and her brother (played by Moretti).  It’s all very complicated – just like it is in real life, and Moretti brings authenticity to the story.

All of this is pretty somber, but our heroine is making a movie, and she has cast an astonishingly pompous American star (John Turturro) who claims to speak more Italian that he really does and who can’t remember his lines.  Every scene with Turturro is hilarious as he bumbles through the filmmaking with shameless bravado.

Nanni Moretti is a gifted filmmaker who has been successful in varied genres. I really enjoyed his comedy We Have a Pope, about a newly elected pope who suffers a panic attack and flees the Vatican. This is more serious stuff. The Wife, who liked it less than I did, refers to it as the “depressing Italian dying mother movie”. I found it very affecting, especially the emotionally satisfying ending.

I saw My Mother at the Mill Valley Film Festival in October 2015, but its theatrical release is now expected in March 2016.

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