My Mother’s Smile
Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: C+ Film: C+
Marco Bellocchio is a director who is willing to take
chances. His 2002 film My Mother’s
Smile ticked off The Catholic Church enough to blasphemous, often a badge
of honor for mature intelligent films.
Sergio Castlellitto stars as the very unreligious Ernesto, who is told
by a church official that his kind mother might be beatified as a saint because
of the life she led and the brutal way she was killed.
There is finding the murderer and finding out that she
forgave the person killing her as she was killed! The rest of his family is trying to pull him into the Church’s
plans and if it were not crazy enough, he actually has a connection to the
killer. The windup is that The Church
is up to no good and that they only expect their majority of non-elite
followers to make such unconditionally selfless sacrifices needing “examples’
to continue the sick sacrificing. The
Church has always been a target and for good reasons, but after betraying the
working class in the 1980s they had been so supportive of in the past at their
best, one can understand why such a film was made.
The film is smart, well-constructed and thought out, as
well as well acted and directed, but the problem is that early on one knows how
messed up this is going to get.
However, you can never makes vital points enough and though this is not
as bold or challenging as Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary or Martin
Scorsese’s Last Temptation Of Christ not surprisingly both from the
1980s, and with a Church in Fascist times having a new Pope with a suspect
past, My Mother’s Smile is more important that its content and even its
mixed ending does not change that.
The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image is lacking in
detail and the color is good, but not great.
Cinematographer Pasquale Mari, A.I.C., does go for a muted look, but
this transfer does not revel all of it.
I will add that the look is a little predictable as it deals with The
Vatican the way we have seen that dealt with many times before. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo has no real
surround information. Extras include
the original trailer for this and four other New Yorker titles, interviews with
Bellocchio & Castlellitto and a separate conversation between the two.
- Nicholas Sheffo
