THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
His first feature film, You deserve a love (2019), had been selected for Critics’ Week in Cannes and at the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival, where he obtained the Valois for Directing. This year, his second film, Good mother, was also found on the Croisette, in the Un certain regard selection, which awarded him the Ensemble Prize. It is to say if the realization succeeds to the actress Hafsia Herzi, who, since its revelation in The grain and the mule (2007), by Abdellatif Kechiche, has appeared in more than thirty films. And befits her, if we are to believe the peculiar, energetic and tender way she found to tell her own stories.
In Good mother, these are the northern districts of Marseille (where Hafsia Herzi grew up) and Nora (Halima Benhamed), who is raising her five children there alone. His close-up face opens and closes the film. He speaks of the fatigue, the gentleness and the dignity of this character to which the director is attached, to pay tribute to her mother and to all the others. “As long as I am standing, I will remain solid”Nora said to one of her sons, summing herself up. No need to look for a better formula. This is the most fair, the most embodied in the image. And this, thanks to the magnificent presence of its interpreter, Halima Benhamed, unprofessional actress who one wonders, from the foreground, if she is playing a role or if she is herself.
Because before being a character, Nora, as we say popularly with admiration, ” it’s someone “. Waking up before dawn to go to the airport where she works as a cleaning lady, she goes back home to an old woman whom she cleans, groceries and cooks, before returning home to take care of her home. apartment and her children. Two girls, one working and the other not. Two sons, one a good kid and a good student, the other a slacker who takes himself for a hero. And then there’s the eldest, in prison, whom she visits to cheer him up.
A family hubbub
At 50, however, Nora longs to rest. And also to rebuild his teeth that his pregnancies have damaged by dint of pumping him “All its calcium and vitamins”. Fifteen years that she has put money aside to be able to change them and no longer suffer. The appointment is made, the sum ready… she will finally go to the lawyer for her son’s trial. So is Nora’s life, maternal love and the sacrifices it imposes. What to pour into the melodrama. It would be to betray the character. Hafsia Herzi does not make the mistake.
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