To have a laugh about our crazy and sad reality.
Direction: Jean-Paul Salomé Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Hippolyte Girardot, Liliane Rovère, Farida Ouchani Original title: La daronne Country: France Year: 2020 Release date: 04-23-2021 Genre: Comedy Script: Jean-Paul Salomé, Hannelore Cayre Photography: Julien Hirsch Synopsis: Patience is a wiretapping translator for the Narcotics Squad. The work is hard and poorly paid. During an investigation she discovers that one of the traffickers she listens to is the son of the dedicated nurse who takes care of her mother. She decides to cover up for him and, with hardly any planning, she finds herself with an important stash. With the help of her new partner, a former police dog, she seizes her opportunity and becomes Mamá María at the head of a marijuana sales network thanks to her knowledge of the street and all the information she gets through her work.
Best: Huppert, as the great lady of transgression.
The worst: to enjoy the irrelevance of it you have to transcend the correction.
Years go by, author cycles, generational changes between great performers, and Isabelle Huppert is still there, immovable in the pantheon of the great transgressive figures of world cinema. Her name is synonymous with nonconformity; her small constitution, her almost brittle, and the stony strength of her characters combine to blow up the normative. An ability to dismantle the social order that she shines through even in a film like Mama Maria, which could have been absorbed by the more adolescent side of French popular comedy. Here, as a court interpreter who combines her work for the Paris narcotics squad with criminal shenanigans, Huppert turns upside down, with gestural and typological humor, the complex multicultural balances and the propensity for authoritarianism of the French state. . What other actress would emerge unscathed from such a transparent criticism of the way in which the police system is cruel to young people of Arab origin who fall for drug trafficking networks? Maybe Juliette Binoche, or Adèle Haenel, few more.
Based on the crime novel The Godmother by Hannelore Cayre, Mamá María dives into the clichés that fly over current French reality to end up outlining, halfway between the family drama and the subversive comedy, the bond of sisterhood that is established between some women French, Arab and Asian women fighting for dignity on the margins of the system. Another gift from ‘Mama Huppert’.
