The Second Mother is an awkward title that doesn't quite make sense even after you've seen the movie. That might be because it's an English-language title for a Brazilian film. Foreign films often suffer in U.S. distribution through the unattractive or nonsensical titles slapped on them by careless or clueless translators. The title does, however, situate the film as a melodrama in the purest sense of the word: both happy and sad, realistic and idealistic, worried about a social issue in an upbeat way, appealing to popular sentiment. You can catch this harmless bit of maternalistic demagoguery starting Friday at Landmark Theatres.
If you've watched too many Chabrol movies, as I have, and loved every minute of them, you will have developed a taste for the brand of melodrama that only drags the upper-class family onscreen in order to skewer it. This fetishistic act of disembowelment is central also to Bunuel and other filmmakers working in French, including Passolini. The sensibility might be considered Noir but predates Noir, which is thought to have infected U.S. cinema during World War II. Anyway, it's an old trend, and by now "the family" has been skewered so many times in so many ways that only an original sensibility can arrest so jaded a viewer as myself.
Spoiler alert. Writer-director Anna Muylaert's originality consists in setting up the classic situation known as "the uninvited guest" and teasing the audience with tantalizing possibilities of con artistry, only to retract them one by one until the viewer is left with a rather disappointing, syrupy fairy tale about a young woman from the sticks who passes a tough entrance exam for an exclusive architecture school in Sao Paulo, thus besting the boy who stole her mom. That's it. A happy ending with populist pretensions. Hey, it won the 2015 Berlinale Audience Award. Everyone loves a happy ending, except possibly a film reviewer for whom Chabrol was as a second mother.
The title character is a live-in housekeeper hired to raise a motherless young rich boy in the big city, thus paying for her own daughter's upbringing back home. Regina Case as the nanny is a less erotic, less tragic, goonier Anna Magnani. I wish Muylaert had made this a slapstick comedy and simply let Case loose, because although she makes a fine maudlin maidservant, she has it in her to make a truly great anarchic housewrecker along the lines of Harpo and/or Chico Marx. Ahem. Melodrama takes itself too seriously for that. After a slow start, the intrigue finally kicks in at minute 25, when the lithe yet pig-headed daughter arrives to blur the unspoken class boundaries in the home.
I kept thinking of Passolini's Theoreme (1969), in which uninvited guest Terence Stamp destroys a wealthy family from within simply by lounging around in tight pants with a volume of Baudelaire. Passolini was a metaphysician, and Muylaert is, well, in her own words, "I'm a woman, I'm Brazilian, I'm a mother who is trying to do cinema that I believe in." In her director's statement in the press notes mailed to me by the publicist along with a copy of the DVD, she says, "I started writing this script 20 years ago, when I had my first child and realized how noble a job it is to bring up a child." Italics mine.
That word noble is a melodramatic word. Muylaert goes on to decry the tradition of child-rearing by live-in nanny, something her mother did to her, without clarifying whether she herself employed outside help when the time came. Either way, this film feels like the product of a guilty conscience. Either way, we know why Muylaert films Case nobly walking through a room full of party guests who take or refuse hors d'oeuvres from her platter without meeting her noble eyes. Nobility, like self-pity, is not very interesting dramatically, but fuels the sort of sentimental hogwash Hollywood films specialize in when they're not touting the nobility of revenge-killing. If you do go see The Second Mother, I suggest Chabrol's pitiless La Ceremonie (1996) as a palate-cleanser. Epatez la bourgeoisie, baby!