“We clung to her shining light.” This line, taken from a spare narration by Ernest (Ahmed Sylla), the youngest son of Rose (Annabelle Lengronne), captures the essence of this beguiling but frustrating family drama. He’s talking about his fearless, fiercely charismatic mother, who in 1989 flees Ivory Coast with her two young sons to start a new life in France.
Lengronne is magnificent and magnetic in the role. Reverently lit, so that her queenly profile is the only thing we notice whenever she’s in the shot, she is imperiously in control of her own needs and her own pleasure. “I choose my men myself,” she says firmly to a matchmaking auntie.
The men come and go. And her boys are increasingly left to fend for themselves as Rose toils as a hotel chambermaid. She instils a few key lessons; never to let anyone see you cry and, above all: “The most important thing is to succeed.”
The great achievement of Mother and Son, the second feature film from Jeune Femme director Léonor Serraille, is the creation of this fascinating and flawed central character. But the film’s fatal error is to move her to the background of the story after the first third.
A three-chapter structure focuses on the family members in turn: Rose, her troubled older son, Jean, and finally the youngest, Ernest. However sensitively handled, the stories of adolescent angst don’t quite match the potency of Rose’s journey. A riveting final confrontation between Rose and Ernest recaptures the early spark. But it also reminds us how keenly we feel her absence as a character.
