Mother of Tears (2007)

[mjaycox]

Son of a biscuit, this one's bad.

It's too easy to jump on the "Dario has lost it and hasn't a made a good film since 'Opera'" bandwagon. ( I would actually go farther back than that). So I went into this very open-minded, hoping to be scared, or even shocked. I REALLY did.

Honest. 

Stop looking at me like that. I sincerely tried. Even after the incredibly stupid part where...

Okay, okay I know. You don't watch a Dario flick for lucidity of plot. But at his best, the nightmarish quality of it made you go along, like a Bunuel film, or Fellini's later stuff. So I wasn't expecting a "real world at all. But in the scenes in which we are establishing the reality, people do retarded things.

Here: ask yourself these questions:

1) Would two Italian graduate students, majoring in Art Restoration, really open up a priceless old artifact which had been sealed in wax and was addressed specifically to their boss,  in an obviously non-climate-controlled room with with no lights on with a goddamn rusty screwdriver and then paw through the contents WITHOUT gloves on? That's gonna be a hard thing to explain at your thesis defense (well you see, professor, it wasn't addressed to us, and thus it was so attractive to us, and the rusty screwdriver was the only thing nearby and well, you know how it is.)

2) Would the heroine, after seeing her best friend ripped apart and strangled with her own (very CGI-ish) entrails  REALLY go home and have sex with her boyfriend that night? And while we are on the subject, why the fudge was she ONLY questioned at the scene? Even in Dario's universe, that would have to be one of the more horrific recent crimes in Rome's history. They would take that chick down to the station, not release her to some guy whose name THEY DON"T EVEN ASK FOR!  (Oh, sure random guy, take this girl who is the only witness to a horrible mutilation).

3) Oh, and as she gets home with boyfriend, a little kid comes out of the bedroom in PJ's wanting a bedtime story. As the dad lives alone and clearly has no nanny, this little tike has been left home all alone. He is like 5 years old! I forget the kid' name but it might as well be MacGuffin because he quickly turns into a plot contrivance.

4) Does anyone really find Goth girls scary? I don't know how anyone can find goths scary. They are only slightly less annoying than hippies (mostly because they have better musical taste-- I am sorry, the Cure and Morrisey just rock my world, what can I say?). But I digress. Goths. Yes. Dario used to know they weren't scary. That's why they weren't in the first two movies in this series (Suspiria and Inferno). Crazy old matriarchs of dance schools? Those are scary. Bed ridden old women who reek of death viewed from a distance? That's scary. Disembodied cat's eyes appearing at a window several floors up? That's scary. Trying to escape through a window and landing on a bed of barbed wire? Silly, but scary. A lone girl running through the forest at night, while rain pounds and Goblin is on the soundtrack? THAT's scary. Two dumb girls in goth gear and make-up ripped off Darryl Hannah in Blade Runner staring menacingly across the street, in broad daylight, is just retarded.  A coven of witches disembarking a plane at the airport, dressed like they are going to a "We Love the 80s" party, and cackling as though they had been enjoying the in-flight drinks in business class? That is NOT scary.

5) Is seeing the split second image of a demon-gargoyle in the lens of a camera as it is snapping a pic of a centuries-old casket scary? No. Not least of which because it does stinger music to draw attention to itself. Taking a picture of the casket and later developing the film and finding a picture of the beast on the negative, although a rip-off of "the Omen" and Stephen King's "The Sun Dog", would have been scary.

6) If you are a film-maker and you have a scene in which a mother, possessed by the devil or whatever, decides to take her child out of the stroller and pitch it off a bridge into the river, do you actually keep and use the take in which the dummy baby accidentally hits the stone pedestal of the bridge and suddenly spins around and around superfast like a catherine wheel, thus declaring to all the world, "Hey, I am just a dummy. But to prove the point, I won't wiggle at all when I hit water, but will sink like a stone!" It's like Dario is completely without instincts. There are, God help me, proper ways to film an infanticide (the scary scene in the not-as-bad-as-they-say "The Final Conflict" is one example).

7) So-- do you think the witches in Italy are Maybeline girls? or Max Factor? Because this is a question you will be asking yourself when you see all them assembled. I know witches probably should and maybe DO wear make-up. But why do they all look  like they applied it using the back pages of OUI magazine as a guide? If they are all gonna go to so much trouble to put make-up on, it should be for a REASON, not simply as window dressing.  Is it ancient Egyptian? Sumerian? lapuz lazuli? What? Seriously. Now... Roman Polanski's Macbeth-- that had a Witches coven in it.

8. Do you really find an objective camera style scary? Usually it is the subjective style that is frightening. Restricting our knowledge to what the heroine, or the killer see. (or such as in the case of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, what a passerby might see). Dario used to understand this (recall his masterful take of David Hemmings running down the hallway of portraits in 'Deep Red'. An objective camera would have drawn attention to the face in the mirror). He apparently no longer understands this, or perhaps even more sadly, thinks todays audience is too stupid to understand unless you draw their eye to everything.

The conclusion to trilogies are usually a let-down. Star Wars, Spider-Man 3, The Matrix Recycled (or whatever the hell it was called), all arrive with an anticipation and a build-up of expectation which can be hard to match. Lord of the Rings is on a short lost of of series that succeed.   

But that was where "Mother of Tears" should have had it made in the shade: Dario's universe in those films was so bizarre, so unreal, so fantastical, what expectations could honestly be built up? There was no recurring character to see come back. The mythology of the Three Mothers was so flimsy, no one could reasonably expect it to be solidified in any conclusion. All one should really need to be happy was some baroque atmosphere, some inventive death scenes, a sense of unease, a nifty soundtrack, and the long-awaited appearance of the third mother. It should have been a cinch, and I would be lying to you if I said I hadn't, like many an Argento fan, had some visions in my head about what this movie would eventually look like. It wasn't expectation so much as it was rumination. This movie fails miserably on all those scores. And it is the one thing no Argento film should ever be: It is boring.

Skip it.

Want to see a great film set in Rome? Watch "Plein Soleil (Purple Noon)". The first adaptation of "The Talented Mister Ripley" (I only mention it because I watched it again the other day)

Want to see a great horror film set in Italy? See "Don't Look Now."

Want to see a great film centered around witches and you've already seen Suspiria? Well unfortunately there really aren't any.  There are some good ones to be sure (Blair Witch, Blood on Satan's Claw). But great? You could track down the old episode of Thriller called "La Strega." Now that was a great one. Or "Pigeons from Hell." Another great one. AND if you want a more interesting take on the story of Mater Lacrimarum, read Kim Newman's quite good "Judgement of Tears" aka Dracula Cha Cha Cha).

All for now.

Beast witches,

Matt Jaycox
UM Medic