As you get older you start to think more about your life. About what you still might want to accomplish, what is important to you, things you might want to do differently or how to better take care of your finances better so you have less fixed expenses. That usually starts around fourty/fifty as you usually have accomplished a lot of things you set out to do, hopefully are relatively happy and slowly realize that your parents won’t live forever.
That realisation hits everyone differently and your life experience and personality decide how you’ll deal with that. The main character in Mia Madre, the Italian Margherita (Margherita Buy), struggles with these existential questions. Her mother isn’t doing well and as a director she is in the middle of filming her latest movie.
Filming gets even more difficult when Barry Huggins (John Turturro, who has a blast in his role), an actor from America arrives in Italy. Margherita picks him up from the airport and Barry didn’t know who she is and even starts flirting with her. When they get on set he turns out to be a source of a lot of problems because he keeps forgetting his lines or doesn’t pronounce the words right. Together with her personal issues, including a relationship that has ended and her mother being hospitalized and quickly getting worse brings her to a breaking point at which she has trouble controlling her emotions.
Mia Madre is a film which isn’t very accessible when it comes to structure. Various moments are mixed together. Sometimes you are at the set of the movie she’s shooting, next she is visiting her mother, you might see flashbacks or even dream sequences. Director Nanni Moretti (who plays Margherita’s brother) probably tries to give the viewer a sense of the mental state the protagonist is in, but I can imagine this might confuse some viewers. I didn´t have any issues with that (if I had watched this late in the evening this might have been different). The film gives an interesting look into the life of someone dealing with the loss of control of her life. Buy manages to show that feeling well. Mia Madre might not be a movie which will be liked by a wide audience, but which I really enjoyed watching.
