Making Saintness is not a hagiographical directive, thankfully, in “Mom”, the Macedonian director Teona Struger Mitevska’s story of seven crucial days in the life of a 37-year-old mother Teresa. Unnecessary reverence was one charge Cooked against William Riead’s “The Letters”, the last major narrative fiction of the globally beloved Albanian-born Catholic nun who was granted Sainthood almost two decades after passing in 1997, a delay Mitevska’s feminist therapy, half a century earlier, would have considered surprisingly late. When she tells a cherished male ally in an early scene, the world is driven by “men, men and men.”
Howver, Due To Uneven Writing (Mitevska Co-Wrote The Script With Goce Smilevski and Elma Tagaragic) That Still Does Well To Be Concrely Founded On Interviews Mitevska Conducted More Than 15 Years “” “” “” “. That, Its Bold Stylistic Flourishes Notwithstanding, Isn Ultimately Forceful or Persuasive. This is largely due to the fact that the internal turmoil that we are led to believing that the central characters do not always inform the interpersonal confessions that the audience can conclude on their own. What comes through is Noomi Rapace‘S accessible interpretation of teresa, with a punk rock alter-ego-if not a dragon tattoo-that delights even if it is discordant, and her charied, Platonic yet intimate relationship with sister agnieszka, play 2049 “) shouldment the burden of the filmDramatic driving force.
Seven chapters in falling order structure the film’s story as a countdown of hiccups, annoyances and even a hallucination, one day each in an important week that will determine the fate of Teresa. When the film opens, Teresa has been the superior Mother Superior in the Calcutta chapter in the Sisters of Loreto Assembly for a decade earlier but feels that she has grown out her usefulness for the four-century old institution. She is consciously waiting to hear back from the Vatican regarding her application to start her own order, a privilege that is rarely granted women.
It has been a year since India’s independence from the British, but for mother the suffering was just as enormous before or after the country got its tumultuous nationality. The most vulnerable – starving children, people affected by leprosy and pregnant women without the remote possibility of health care – are always needed to; The colonial reality was intact. In fact, her mother feels that she can save millions more lives if only the Vatican acknowledged her plan.
Credit to the filmmaker that she does not depend on poverty pores that many rightly accuse other popular films by white directors in India (watching you, “Slumdog Millionaire”). Mitevska, however, corresponds to the popular imagination in the extreme devotion that Saint Teresa exhibits against the downs. In a visceral scene with complex dignity, Mom removes Maggots from a living man’s rotting meat. The Macro 1900s Western rhetoric of Catholic charity can certainly be criticized for not getting involved in the driving ideological role as a throw, but it is not the interest in or for this film.
Instead, a gripping conflict is between the two nuns. Mother’s turbulent self -examination is urged by the revelation of sister Agnieszka’s pregnancy in the first act of the film. We have barely registered Agnieszka as a protagonist until then, only the hint that she is a mother’s chosen successor (her “number one”) if the Vatican honors her foundation. In their first scene, there are playful ashams when they move furniture and debate the advantage of not being tied to spaces and objects, even when mom relaxes in sister that she “lost a child today.”
Later, when the two mole over a handwritten constitution of best practice, which includes wearing simple cotton and visiting family once every ten years, are distressed, sister is forced to share her secret. In a case of the film’s many calculated about moving framing selection, Mitevska and DP Virginie Saint Martin cover half the frame completely with the back of Mom’s black veil, which allows us to focus on Hoek’s face when she pronounces the word “pregnant.” Rapace answers externalize four different beats, from a snort to a tear, surprise to anger. The film’s Docufiction-like honesty is the most eye-catching here: to imagine that modern Teresa that the world primarily feels as a flawless octogenar can have as a younger woman had similar intense moments of extreme conflicting feelings is humanizing and lovely. Here we are at least able to feel and feel both women’s pain.
Despite this structure in chapter seven and six, the remaining five chapters do not always allow us to understand the warring impulses between women. Sister confronts mom to know what it means to fall in love; The use of a representation of a feminine portrayal of God to cover Sister’s face comes over as a forced visual device than as a character’s belief that earthly love can approach the divine. A dining room that sister greatly enters any kind of trance does not seem to snort the other sisters who are not interested in the blasphemical situation. Several heated discussions about abortion, which should be fascinating as clues to the debate in the 40s, feel didactic. Especially a later sequence, which is cheering for “hard rock hallelujah” and as a mitevska that strongly adorns with surrealism, suddenly suddenly because there is little evidence that mother’s dialectics with sister would create the radical doubt that is placed within mother.
Thus, much of the narrative credibility of the main characters’ dilemma does not always land. In contrast, mother’s exchange with Father Friedrich (Nikola Ristanovski), the film’s most important character, often works, because they seem to have the sibling -like affection that mother insists on being rumored to have older nun they have. Also admirable are other craft elements, especially the camera in two internal rotunds to capture the characters that spirals; the lighting of the dumped dough that makes scenes; And the use of songs of belief in solemn world building, which when the sisters cut the hair by lachrymos Inductors. As a Cinematic Tapestry, Mitevska’s monastery movie feels cut from the Calcutta cloth in 1948 and from the Catholic missionary you attribute to that time.
It can be argued that for a movie about the disasters in the corridors of faith, there are few leaps of transcendence in “Mom”. But the film is not primarily about it. Mitevska wants to tell a story about two women trying to find common foundation, even friendship, even though they are on different roads. Mitevska also refuses to sanctify Mother Teresa more than necessary, instead portray her as a strict disciplinary who believed in organizational practice as much as in the children’s inherent holiness. When it comes to transcendence, there is a set of scenes when a character unexpectedly adorns red while another line of blue. Not really catarsis but a change in the face of what we laymen would call trauma. Smaller transformations like these help to canonize a grounded about fairly incorrect drama.
Rating: B-
“Mother” opened the Orrizonti section 2025 Venice Film festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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