The Mother

The interplay of light and texture in Alwin Küchler’s fine cinematography alone makes the British film The Mother worth seeing. There are other reasons not to miss this sensitive, perceptive drama about a widow’s erotic re-awakening in the hands of a swaggering, pansexual carpenter some 30 (or more) years her junior. But to begin with a few images.

On the afternoon that May (Anne Reid) and Darren (Daniel Craig) retreat for the first time to a spare room in her son’s London townhouse, and he satisfies her, the frame splits almost diagonally between sharp definition (a billowing, white lace curtain on the lower left) and deliberate out-of-focus (granting the lovers in bed a bit of post-coital privacy on the upper right). In one highly charged composition, the left side of the screen remains nearly blank while on the right all we see of Darren is a muscular arm thrusting up and down, sawing wood. Later, when May and Darren’s trysts have grown more adventurous and explicit, the camera pans above their bodies, above the sounds of May’s orgasmic pleasure, to reflect Darren’s face in the glass of a triptych hanging on the bedroom wall, black-and-white snapshots of wet, sandy beaches and imposing, crevice-filled rock formations.