Almost a quarter of a century ago, more precisely in 2001, the official and main competition program of the Cannes Festival premiered a film by the Italian filmmaker Nani Moretti. My son's room (The stanza del figlio), after which an intriguing discussion ensued: how ethical it is to narrate (via film) stories about the life of parents after the death of a child, considering that in those cases, the audience naturally sympathizes with the one who needs to continue living after an immeasurable loss. Then the evaluation of the skill of the author and his collaborators, as well as the overall kinesthetic range of the work, necessarily fall into the background, because film, among other things, is distinguished from other arts by its communicativeness and receptivity to a wider circle of "consumers". The discussion, however interesting it was, ended by itself, and Nani Moretti is in favor My son's room also won the Palme d'Or for the best films and the FIPRESCI award, which is awarded by film critics on the spot. However, the dilemma still exists, and here it is now with us, because last weekend the cinema distribution of the film finally started. Mother Mara in the direction of Mirjana Karanović, she is also one of the screenwriters, and she also plays the main role, which she tailored according to her imagination and her own acting needs and affinities.
Mirjana Karanović, therefore, portrays the central character of Mara, a successful corporate lawyer, seemingly distanced from her family and business environment, who finds herself at a turning point when she is forced to continue her life after the sudden death of her only son, in her early twenties. The natural death of the young man further deepens the terrible "task" of the mother to continue a life devoid of meaning and more fairness. This setup is completely legitimate, although at the same time it is thoroughly exploited. This topic was not only addressed by Moretti, but a whole series of filmmakers devoted a good part of their creative work to the study of the morphology of pain as a heavy shadow and bukagi that cannot be removed. Even more experienced film buffs might quickly think of the Canadian author Atom Egoyan, who in his two key films, Exoticism i Sweet tomorrow, dealt, among other things, with the said topic. However, if we take Egojan as a related and relevant example, and in his works we follow the evolution of pain in the context of low-intensity drama and turbulent core, in the film Mother Mara we arrive in front of a cold and overly restrained drama similar to melodramas that have been coming to us for the last ten years primarily from French cinematography and from francophone addresses. And again - it is a completely legitimate choice of the author, but then the question arises, what did the film as a whole "extract" from such a setting? Unlike Mirjana Karanović's previous film A good woman, her directorial debut and undoubtedly a higher-quality achievement, Mother Mara in its striving for ellipses in the representation of pain, even with its counter-rational staging, it irreversibly falls into vanity. If we leave aside the general places, make-up on the plane of mere appearances (with another excellent cinematography work by Igor Marović, the young director of photography) and reaching for numerous tried-and-tested solutions and patterns, even the most well-intentioned viewer offers only a story without enough momentum, with the ultimate ranges somewhere on the level of better television works.
In principle, in a more thoughtful execution Mother Mara was able to de-taboo a lot of things: the morphology of pain, the concept of film melodrama, the established sense of what is appropriate for women in their mature years, the palpable relationship between pain and sensuality... In addition, it was possible to follow the French and Francophone model and follow the path of a parathriller, i.e. a drama that takes the form of a thriller in which those who are affected by pain trace their own mistakes and inadequacies and, at the same time, get to know those whose death hurts them unbearably. Indeed, on several occasions it seems that Mara's mother will take that path - when, for example, she starts mentioning her son's girlfriend, whom she did not even know about before her son's death, we think that she will, therefore, enter more closely into her son's private, secret life, which is obviously less visible to her, and in this way she will get to know herself more fully not only as a mother who naturally mourns (although without tears, and which the environment resents) her child, but also herself as a unique person who strives for fullness of life. There are clear indications that the story of this film, at some point, in some of the earlier stages of the script's evolution, moved along that path, and it is all the more devastating that it did not continue that way. Traces of a more complex drama can be seen, and finally, there is a graphic direction - in the opening credits, the title of the film is stylized as mother (lower case) Mara (therefore, with an initial capital letter), which could metaphorically suggest that we have a film story in front of us, within which we will follow the transformation of a woman from the identity pediment of a mother into a more significant appearance of a person who is first and foremost who she is, meanwhile cruelly deprived of motherhood as important and necessary identity determinants. The trouble is that it stops somewhere, and mother Mara, in contrast to the numerous heroes and heroines of Egojan's chronicles of pain, is an insufficiently interesting character, a person devoid of content, uniqueness, and the search for a new self in her case does not bring anything more cinematically or conceptually intriguing. In this sense, a young Serbian film can be cited as a valid and vivid counterpoint, and as an example of visibly better practice. Have you seen this woman?? by Matija Gluščević and Dušan Zorić, and certainly Requiem for Mrs. J. screenwriter and director Bojan Vuletić. (It was in that film that Mirjana Karanović played her role better and more meaningfully, in which she also had several joint scenes with the young Vučić Petrović, who played the main role in the film Mother Mara).
With its ninety-something minutes, Mother Mara it's not a film that's hard to follow, of course, with the caveat that it's hard to imagine that this film will start a more grounded discussion about the relationship between mature women and (much) younger men, which, fortunately, has been largely de-tabooed. In addition, Mother Mara joins a smaller group of films that describe the lives of the economically relaxed class here: Ajvar, Humidity, True story...However, if we leave drinkability and transparency aside - which should be of unquestionable importance even in Serbian cinematography - Mother Mara it slides down the path of rapid oblivion, or, as it says in a scientific study by Nicholas Carr Plitko: How is the internet?, changes the way we think, we read and remember: "In addition to being engaged in consolidating individual memories in the cerebral cortex, the hippocampus is also thought to play an important role in connecting a variety of separate memories - visual, spatial, auditory, tactile, emotional - that are stored separately in the brain, but come together to give us a single, unfragmented memory of an event." So the hippocampus would in the case Mother Mara connected the dramatic and conceptual potential of this film story (derived from the dramatic text of Tanja Šljivar) into a more harmonious whole, with the possibilities of creating a more complex portrait of a woman who, perhaps, was brought to the point of inevitable metamorphosis by the most penetrating and cruel pain. Due to the similarity of the problems and problematic solutions that weigh heavily on it, we can offer two more recent "regional films", Those are the rules i Nightlife, in which the crowning trouble is also the wrongly placed and fused dramatic center of gravity, and in the case of all three films, one gets the strong impression that wrong turns were made at the crucial moment, and that a potentially impressive drama, which can rightly be praised for its genuineness and fullness of content, has reached a slow-moving emptiness.
