[Review] "Perfect Mothers" with Naomi Watts: "cougar movie" of the year

[original in French]

By Vincent Malausa, Le Plus

"Perfect Mothers" tells the story of two childhood friends who are enamored of their respective sons. Naomi Watts and Robin Wright flare up the new film of Anne Fontaine. Despite its unlikely pitch, the film is a funny UFO, between disorder and novel of erotic station fable.

Anne Fontaine did not realize that the masterpieces (this is an understatement), but it could be that strange Australian exile which earned us this "Perfect Mothers" has enhanced its cinema obsessed with the chic and sensuality.

Often there was a side toc in the films of the filmmaker, sometimes for the worse ("Nathalie...", mediocre infringement of Wong Kar - wai) but also for the best (the nice Apple "The girl from Monaco").

With the nearly impossible pitch of "Perfect Mothers", Anne Fontaine pays the luxury of the incredible with a pretty huge courage: the creation of a completely delusional love quartet in which two sublime forties to amourachent each of the son of the other.....

Sexual radiation

Rather than a sentimental drama peering into the depths of the passionate love, the film is a kind of "cougar-movie" fully subject to the sexual radiance of its two main actresses, Robin Wright and Naomi Watts.

Everything in the film sounds fake and artificial, but this doesn't matter because fountain has only one obsession, pretty nice: shine its two heroines by filming them as two goddesses burying an entire world in their fall (youth, husbands, families and children...).

Filmmaker filme prosaically fire of desires, the effects of waiting and restraint, cut puffs or the sudden raptures of these too beautiful to be true, body playing imagery "eighties" evoking the staid eroticism and ice perversity great films evaporated from this period (from "9 weeks and 1/2" to "Basic Instinct").

Any part, which sees the two actresses expand their empire on the film, is quite remarkable in the way all bend to the rules of disorder and the forbidden, erasing any standard and leaving little by little the unlikely happen.

The pleasure of this cinema without other depth than the impulses of his characters is also that one: believe in the impossible and go beyond the clichés through some dizzying detail (as this whisper barely audible, but upsetting, Naomi Watts, who succumbs to the morning).

Sun, heat... an unreal world

The tourist frame of the film plays for many in the small success of the film. Anne Fontaine always filmed its decorations as postcards, and for the first time it seems a quality: believe in such romance, to get out of any naturalism, and beauty unreal of the small Creek where building action, among tropical greenery and Emerald sea, gives an aspect immediately hallucinated to the film.

There are a few of the beautiful remake of "Plein Soleil" by Anthony Minghella ("the talented Mr. Ripley") in "Perfect Mothers", particularly in the use of a framework illuminated by the Sun and warmth, conducive to fever and dizziness.

The slightly anachronistic aesthetics of the filmmaker is an opening towards the languor and the dream, a form of beauty poisonous and flawed, crawling with latent tensions.

Thus weapon, the film can deploy its plot of roman de gare, he still had this deaf dimension of sexual madness that allows the Viewer to see beyond the a bit tacky spectacle of these two cougars resistant passing time with dread.

The end will give them further reason: the years spin at breakneck speed without that nothing changes in "Perfect Mothers", especially not the passions, a way for the filmmaker to offer its actresses the privilege to believe to the end in their powers of goddesses.