Film Review: Mother of Tears
August 1 2008 at 09:26:08 AM
All in the family.
The final chapter of Dario Argento’s informal horror trilogy instructs us that what you see does not exist, and what you cannot see is the truth. Both aiding and complicating the film’s premise, however, are 90 minutes filled with some of the most gruesome scenes the giallo master has ever staged, offering up a conflict between illusions and reality that isn’t so much reconciled as it is brushed aside in a last minute of brazenness, which leaves one wondering just what exactly was the point.
A 13th century urn is unearthed at a cemetery dig site outside of Rome and sent to the Museum of Ancient Art to be examined by the museum’s director, Michael Pierce. But when opened by studying archaeologist Sarah Mandy (daughter Asia), begets a wave of crime that spreads throughout the city, beginning with the gruesome murder of the assistant curator by three men and a baboon. When Michael’s son is abducted by a cannibalistic doom-cult headed by the mysterious Mater Lacrymarum, he leaves Sarah, alone, wanted by the police and receiving direction from her deceased mother (Actress and real-life mater, Daria Nicolodi), to search for clues as to the group’s whereabouts.
Convoluted as it is, the rest of the terror tale unfolds in a comparatively straightforward manner, rarely cutting away from the film’s principle heroin as she goes up against daddy’s familiar tropes: foxy-eyed omens, inept detectives, allusions to Nazi barbarism, “silentium” and the return of the hammy voiceover from
Inferno midway through the film to recap the
Three Mothers saga and the origins of their three houses (One each in New York, Rome, and Freiberg, Germany…) An expert in the occult (Padre Johhannes, played by Udo Kier) is sought out to help tie the remaining pieces together, explaining that the “darkness” spreading throughout Rome is a means to usher in “the second age ov widges.”
It turns out that Sarah’s mother was herself a “white-witch,” killed years earlier by the first mother, The Mother of Sighs. From here, the film’s unraveling of family secrets begins to look more and more like the Harry Potter movies, complete with poor special effects and loyal companions of the departed who help Sarah develop her own supernatural powers.
Image courtesy of Mitropoulos Films
Flimsy enough already, Mother of Tears is also severely lacking in the arresting cinematography and set-design needed to make it a worthy successor to films like Suspiria and Inferno. There are no searing color schemes, no haunting sense of open spaces, and no grand edifices to speak of. Rather, the film begins to suffocate as the actions plays out inside of cramped department stores, various flats, crowded terminals, and on board trains. The house itself, normally the centerpiece of the pictures, is disappointingly dull, viewed only briefly from outside against a CGI backdrop of clouds. The interior filled with nothing but shadows. We glimpse a few statues during the museum sequences and in various shots around the city, but the emphasis is steered away from the visual delights that might have been and back into the deadening script and bad special effects. “Think about it…we’re standing on five layers of graves,” says one character, before unveiling a magical powder-puff that enables one to see the untold thousands of ghosts still haunting the city. The closest we get to any sense of history are details of paintings by Goya, Rubens, and Baldung Grien compiled into a lackluster opening credit sequence, all of which are virtually re-enacted by the film’s end.
Most frustrating of all is the score by Claudio Simonetti who, in addition to downgrading his usually delirious pieces to hushed synthesizer tones and a bland techno-pop reprisal of the main theme from
Suspiria, blatantly rips off
The Omen’s “Ave Satani.”
It’s just the first of many instances where Argento begins to quote messily from other genre films in order to inject more boo-moments into his own picture. From monstrous creatures barely on screen long enough to justify the makeup to wall-bending ghosts akin to
The Frighteners and a group of epileptics straight out of the
Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Even Mater Lachrymarum looks and acts like a smuttier version of the Countess Bathory-like thrill killer from Eli Roth’s
Hostel II.
The lack of suspense is especially felt during the kill-scenes, which are no longer the ornately composed, well-choreographed, dynamic and exhilarating brand of derangement that raised Argento’s work to canonical status, but cold acts of torture and disfigurement. After decades of controversy and debates over aesthetics and gender politics,
Mother of Tears is the first Argento movie that genuinely deserves to be called hateful. There’s hardly a woman in the film who isn’t finished off by some manner of phallic impalement. (A particularly nasty, post-coital, no-sex-organ shall be spared scene involving a lesbian couple all but returns Argento to the realm of tired slasher flicks he was once touted as having elevating to great art.) It’s not just women, but children, too. No less than two acts of infanticide are committed during the film, one in an act of unintentional comedy to rival the best of M. Night Shyamalan's worst in this year’s
The Happening.
None of this, however, is meant to imply that Argento somehow no longer cares about his work. On the contrary, his protection of Sarah/Asia as the film’s sole purveyor of natural goodness is almost touching, and takes on a literal sense when compared to the bolt-on physique of the film’s villainess. But by the time we’re introduced to a coven of powder-faced glamour models with the power to make someone bleed from their eye-sockets, we are in the presence of a director knowingly and purposely taking advantage, completely aware and copping to the worst of his excesses and completely in love with it. If the preceding hour’s mayhem weren’t enough, the final, poorly dubbed scene of the lone survivors simultaneously epitomizes the classic Argento anti-climax while confessing the film’s myriad weaknesses all in one shot. All you can really do is laugh.
[Todd DePalma]
.jpg "Jailbait (NSFW)")
.jpg "Interview: Lugubrum")
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