Chicago Reader by Andrea Gronvall
So clinically detached it borders on absurd.
France, Portugal, Austria · 2004
Rated NC-17 · 1h 50m
Director Christophe Honoré
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Louis Garrel, Joana Preiss, Emma de Caunes
Genre Drama
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Based on George Bataille's posthumous and controversial novel: When his father dies, a young man is introduced by his attractive, amoral mother to a world of hedonism and depravity.
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Chicago Reader by Andrea Gronvall
So clinically detached it borders on absurd.
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
Based on a novel by French provocateur Georges Bataille, an important thinker whose fiction rarely translates into good cinema.
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
This tale of disaffected sexual depravity is practically a parody of the worst of French filmmaking.
Village Voice by Jessica Winter
Can't transcend its own suffocating milieu.
For all its shocking content, it remains a rather conventional psychological portrait of Oedipal attraction taken to a disturbing extreme.
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
Degrading, disgusting and depressing.
Honoré never gets beneath these characters' sunburned skins, and well before the end, the film tips irretrievably over into the realm of absurdity.
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
Ma Mère may be ludicrous, but its cast displays a commitment that deserves more than grudging admiration.
Huppert is wonderful, as usual, and she's to be congratulated for taking this daring role. But, alas, even she can't save Ma Mere.
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