The Second Mother
In Anna Muylaert’s touching, funny and ultimately shocking film, maternity comes under the microscope – along with the Brazilian class system.
Maternity
comes in many shades. To Fabinho, his nanny and family’s housekeeper,
Val, is a
woman who seems to understand him better than his own biological
mother, Bárbara.
For Bárbara and her husband Carlos, Val is the essential engine of
their
household, a woman who understands their quirks and demands and who
runs their
lives with unquestioning efficiency. Val is not only a second mother to
Fabinho
but is the integral heart of the family. She is
family. But Val is also the biological mother of Jéssica, a
teenager Fabinho’s age, whom Val has not seen for ten years. When
Jéssica
announces that she is coming to São Paulo to sit an admissions exam,
she is
keen to be reunited with the mother she hardly knows. But how can the
smart and
attractive Jéssica fit in with the structured status quo of her
mother’s world?
With
a
deftness and canny understanding of the human condition, the São
Paulo-born
filmmaker Anna Muylaert sets up her domestic drama with the
compassionate know-how
of her female protagonist. She is in no hurry to scatter her narrative
with melodramatic
plot-holds, but eases us gently into the politics and family dynamic of
this
privileged Brazilian household. She is blessed by a wonderfully warm
and funny
performance from the comedian and TV personality Regina Casé, whose Val
is both
sly and long-suffering, yet completely human. When Jéssica (Camila
Márdila) finally
turns up to discomfit the social sang-froid, it is a relief that she is
pretty
but not stunning, and that she even resembles her on-screen mother.
Here, every
nuance rings true. And it says a lot of a film when one of its most
suspenseful
and dramatic highlights is the illicit consumption of a tub of ice
cream…
Above
all, The Second Mother is bracingly
believable,
yet still very funny, shocking and poignant, with all the
embarrassment, pain,
humour, hypocrisy, joy and injustice of real life vacuum-packed into
its
sublime 111 minutes.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Regina
Casé, Michel Joelsas, Camila Márdila, Karine Teles, Lourenço Mutarelli.
Dir Anna Muylaert, Pro Caio Gullane, Fabiano Gullane, Debora Ivanov and Anna Muylaert, Screenplay Anna Muylaert, Ph Bárbara Alvarez, Art Dir Marquinho Pedroso, Ed Karen Harley, Music Vitor Araújo and Fábio Trummer, Costumes Cláudia Kopke and André Simonetti.
Africa Filmes/Globo Filmes/Gullane Filmes-Soda
Pictures.
111 mins. Brazil. 2015. Rel: 4 September 2015. Cert. 15.