Ma Mère

«In an ideal world, a pure friendship would unite us. 
 But there is no ideal world»

To my surprise Cristophe Honore's «Ma Mère» only got 3.7/10 rating on Rotten Tomatoes as well as 3 star rating on Netflix. I cannot disagree more. Yes, we can criticize to no end how the movie is full of deranged explicit sexual scenes and incest and how immoral it is – but we are, thus, not judging the film as an art form, expressing an idea and doing it well, but integrating it into our moral code making us blind to unbiased criticism. The movie is exceptional – brilliant for the exact rawness that it is judged for. «Ma Mère» is supposed to raise anger, desperation and a certain sense of voyeristic guilt. Just like the characters are voyeurs of their own orgies so are we of this film. But one must look past the sexual content of this film to discover its true meaning – that of human desperation in the face of loss. The loss of husband to an accident, an abandoned child craving, begging for his mother's love and attention. At the end, the movie is not about the animal magnetism of the human libido but the helplessness of the human nature in the face of life and its difficulties, of everpresent universal loneliness. The servility with which the family sinks to sexual annihilation is the only source of liberation in the collapse, lack of ideals and aspirations. The critics have to steer away for once from their own meters of morality and see the film as a sole manifestation of obsession as well as peace, selfishness as well as selflessness, disfunction as well as psychological core, atheism and religious fanaticism, chaos and order.