Guy Lodge Film CriticNobody who has lived their entire life in one country can fully understand the strange, intimate disruption of emigrating as a family.
For a time, parents and children are united and equal in disorientation, the adults’ authority on hold as all parties mutually wander and fumble their way through new cultures, geographies and social circles — a shared rite of passage, cutting through separating decades.
Eventually, everyone finds their feet, traditional roles are reasserted, and stable family life resumes — except when it doesn’t, as depicted in Léonor Serraille’s delicate but wrenching second feature “Mother and Son.” An unsentimental but stoically anguished portrait of a tough single mother and two vulnerable sons settling (or not) in France from the Ivory Coast, it shows how the immigrant experience can equally tighten the knot between parent and child, or permanently unravel it.
An unassumingly ambitious drama, plainly but poetically told in three columns of time over a period of 20 years, this is a confident advance for Serraille from her scrappier 2017 debut “Jeune Femme.” That vastly appealing single-character study won her the Camera d’Or at Cannes, and was driven by a vibrant, untidy feminism in the spirit of Phoebe Waller-Bridge or Lena Dunham.
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