Cannes Review: Leonor Serraille’s ‘Mother And Son’
27.05.2022 - 21:52
/ deadline.com
When his mother spoke, Ernest remembers, everything sounded important. “I cling to her light,” he tells us in voiceover, an adult remembering how that felt. The Ernest he is recalling is just a little boy (Milan Doucansi), snuggled against Rose (Annabelle Lengronne, a wonderfully vivid presence), with his grave and clever older brother Jean (Sidy Fofana) sitting opposite on a train taking them from Cote d’Ivoire to a new French life.
Mother and Son is the story of that life – less story, perhaps, than a tapestry of carefully embroidered details – over 25 years, focusing on each of the three characters in turn. The writer and director, Leonor Serraille, is a young white woman educated at the Sorbonne; she returns to Cannes in competition after winning the Camera d’Or with Jeune Femme in 2017. Nevertheless, the film has the feel of autobiography, piled high with memories. Everything here clearly sounded important to Serraille, too.
We move through time in a lurching movement, each of the three characters moving forward to take center stage in turn. When the children are small, Rose is the star: a venturesome young woman whose parenting style is playful, ramshackle and somewhat intermittent. She and her sons live in a single room in a flat with her sister, brother-in-law and their children; family is what is important, says her brother-in-law. Sister Eugenie (Audrey Kouakou) gets her a job as a cleaner at the hotel where she works and throws a party to welcome her, hoping to match her up with a suitable man sooner rather than later.
Rose, however, is uninclined toward suitable men. She has sex on the roof with a hotel guest. She stays out drinking all night. She misses days at work, supine on the couch, while her sister covers