djellaba and fashion glasses, Isabelle Huppert as a “grand style” dealer

CANAL + CINEMA – THURSDAY, OCTOBER 7, 7:00 p.m. – FILM

If there is a thread to pull in Jean-Paul Salomé, it is undeniably that of cross-dressing. Belphégor, the ghost of the Louvre (2001), Arsène Lupin (2004), Chameleon (2010), so many films where illusion, metamorphosis, imposture, in a word games, are in full swing. In this Mother, Isabelle Huppert – who would have believed it? – put on the “grand style” djellaba, the fashion glasses, the gold mega chain, and play the girl of the air with the Goutte-d’Or, of the schnouff at the level of the Moroccan suitcase.

Her character, Patience Portefeux, interpreter and translator of Arabic in the narcotics brigade, is a long-time widow who earns too little to both properly educate her daughter and to provide, in an establishment worthy of the name, to the needs. of a mother caught up with senile dementia, whose last wishes consist in having her ashes scattered on the luxury shelves of Galeries Lafayette.

We are here in the high vein of popular French comedy, well written, well performed, insolent and good-natured at the same time. Jean-Paul Salomé is inspired by the eponymous successful novel signed, in 2017, by the unusual lawyer-writer Hannelore Cayre, promoted to co-writer of the film.

Double-dealing

Patience retains from his childhood, under the authority of a father who was a magnificent swindler, the nostalgia for a certain comfort of existence. An opportunity presents itself, which it will not have the courage to refuse: a large stock of drugs, left fallow in nature following a police intervention. The idea occurs to him that there is a finally effective way to fight against the downgrading of the middle classes.

But, as we have nothing for nothing in life, it takes on the language, in the guise of a sheikha armored with gold answering the not entirely innocuous name of “Madame Ben Barka”, with two pathetic dealers totally dumbfounded. responding to the nicknames of Scotch and Chocapic.

Escaping the vindictiveness of the owners of the goods, playing a double game with the police commander who is also his tender friend, coaxing the trustee of his building, herself an expert in Franco-Chinese clandestine trafficking, finally taking care to soften the last moments of his mother, it does a lot of things to do simultaneously, including for the director.

In an urban theater which runs alongside the aerial metro from Ménilmontant to Barbès, Jews, Chinese and North Africans, like good children of the motherland, who better the better to steal a Republic which no longer keeps its promises, but which still remains a little welcoming to galley slaves. of the vast world, united under the banner of resourcefulness and cosmopolitanism.

A Republic where the Chamonix orange – these cakes from an opulent era that most people don’t eat, and that Patience stores in his cupboard – give points to Proust’s madeleine.