Mother of Mine's Recent Activity - Spout

Film:Mother of Mine

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:39:18 GMT

Title: Mother of Mine
Year: 2005
Director: Klaus Härö
Plot: The plight of displaced Finnish children sent to Sweden and Denmark to escape the horrors of World War II are explored in director Klaus Härö's tale of a young boy failing to adapt to his strange, and sometimes harsh, new surroundings. Following the death of his father, nine-year-old Eero (Topi Majaniemi) is sent by his mother to live with a foster family in rural Sweden for the duration of the war. Eero is begrudgingly accepted by a surrogate mother who had been hoping for a young girl to help with the chores, and he's mocked by his classmates for his frightened reaction to passing planes. Eero's already troubled childhood is further complicated when his resentful foster mother takes it upon herself to act as a filter for his mother's incoming letters. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 10
Number of Lists: 4
Number of blog posts: 9
Number of discussion threads: 1
SpoutRating: 3

Spout Post: The Year My Parents Went On Vacation (2007)

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:04:22 GMT

Post By: joem18b
Post To: joem18b Blog
Post Date: 9/25/2008 7:04:22 PM
Body: O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias (2006)***** SPOILERS *****The Year My Parents Went On Vaction tells the story of a pre-teen boy in São Paulo, Brazil, separated from his parents during a military coup in 1970. As the army takes over, the country is distracted in part by Brazil's successes in the World Cup of that year (sort of like following the pennant race or NFL football in the U.S. as the country's financial system implodes). The movie is pleasant, never dull, well shot, with a delicate score that adds to the feelings of sadness and loss inherent in the plot (the director threw out the first score written for the movie; Beto Villares then did it over and got it right).TYMPWOV begins with a mother and father taking their son to grandfather's house in São Paulo. The three are riding in a VW bug, '65 or earlier. A Brazilian friend suggests that for verisimilitude, they should have been in a Renault or Citroen, because the bug was the inexpensive car of youth and the lower middle-class; her family always drove French cars. Be that as it may, the movie's streets are rife with vintage bugs and VW buses, though I did spot a Renault or two. I mention this because the first car that I bought and paid for with my own money was a new '67 bug from Belmont Motors in Massachusetts, powder blue. It has been sitting since 1981 or so in a succession of company parking lots, progressively degenerating until, paint gone, wheels seized, flowering weeds growing from dirt caught in the chassis crevicles, it looks so bad that I was ordered to have it towed off the property because it had become an eyesore, at least to one sorehead in the company who remained anonymous - the bug's engine refusing to start, a hole in the floor threatening to release the battery under the back seat like a bomb dropped from its bay at the first speed bump, the windows opaque as my glasses in the Turkish bath down the street. Fortunately, my son stepped up and volunteered to restore the car as a hobby. He abstracted it on a flatbed towtruck via Raul's Towing Service to his driveway, where it sat, partially disassembled, for a week or two before the city, at the behest of neighbors or a cruising patrol car, ordered him to remove it. He rolled the poor thing into his garage, wheels now at least freed, out of sight behind closed doors, and since then he has ordered replacement parts from an unending list. He tells me that there are two sources from which to obtain these parts: (a) a quality manufacturer somewhere or other, or (b)Brazil. You want quality, you go to the quality manufacturer; you want cheap, you go to Brazil. I don't know if that's true or not but when I replaced a bumper a long time ago, it had a "Made in Brazil" sticker on the inside surface. One tap by another vehicle and the bumper folded up like an origami noodle. Also, curiously, '67 door handles are unavailable. But the point is, if you're a bug lover you might want to give TYMPWOV a little love for that reason if for no other.Director/writer Cao Hamburger and his co-writer, Claudio Galperin, were both born in São Paulo in 1962 and were eight years old when General Emilio Medici engineered his coup. Hamburger's parents "went on vacation" at that time, but only for a few weeks. In this movie, Hamburger and Galperin share some of their childhood experiences growing up in the cultural melting-pot of São Paulo. Hamburger's father came from a German/Jewish family that emigrated to Brazil before World War II. His mother was of Italian/Catholic stock, though both parents were non-religious scientists as he grew up. He says that he began thinking about São Paulo's mix of cultures and his roots while living and feeling like an outsider in London, another city where races and nationalities mingle. According to Hamburger (and my Brazilian friends), Brazil is deeply divided over socio-economic class issues (the rich, a small middle-class, and the poor) but is accepting of emigrants; he refers to Brazilian culture as Samba culture - "Samba" here meaning, roughly, "let's all dance together." In fact, Hamburger started out with all sorts of ideas for the movie, but while making it settled on the idea of enjoying the brief periods of sunshine in life on a cloudy day. The movie was made on a medium budget by Brazilian standards. Since the success of films like Central Station and City of God, Hamburger says, funding opportunities for cinema have gotten a lot better. He used professionals as well as non-actors from the community, which in the film is a conservative Jewish neighborhood. Today, Hamburger says, this neighborhood is Korean, but since he is exploring his own roots, for the purposes of the film it remains Jewish. Hamburger spent four months finding an empty apartment building to use for the shoot; the movie was filmed completely on location.So often in making a movie, the director starts out with an idea and massages it until a theme for the film is produced. This process can extend over years with input from editors, writers, friends, family, and assorted other sources while the director chases funding, as I describe in my review of Manda Bala. Hamburger's initial inspiration was to examine the mixture of cultures in Brazil, and from that grew the idea of examining a year in the life of a boy growing up in the same time and place that Hamburger and Galperin did. During the making of the movie, the military coup and contemperaneous world-cup excitement in the film emerged, according to the director, as metaphors for life. It seems to me that some of these metaphors crop up post-production but perhaps I'm just metaphor-blind or metaphor-averse. Does a movie metaphor count if it's discovered after the movie is finished? Does it count if a reviewer invokes it, rather than the director? I do like the way that Claudia Llosa, for example, disavows metaphors in her Maven-reviewed Madeinusa, a movie which could easily be weighed down with them. I'm guessing that Hamburger's military coup and World Cup would remain in the movie whether Hamburger deemed them metaphors or not. As it is, he has one more thing to talk about during interviews. Anyway, the coup represents a dark day and the World-Cup victory represents a shaft of sunlight breaking through the gloom of that day. The dark day is life under the military regime and the sunlight represents those moments in life that you must embrace in order to get through the bad patches - did I just nest a metaphor within a metaphor there? The life of goalies in general is also a metaphor in the movie, but if the victory is a bright shaft of sunlight, what is the goalie? A meteorite the size of Oshgosh? Who knows? The gray day/sunlight metaphor, applied to my own personal life, would be like at my work, where my boss would be dictator General Emilio Medici, and out of the grinding gray of morning I would emerge at lunchtime to sit down across from Izzy Vulvano and beat his pants off playing Magic and using my special red and black deck. Also the movie is about dealing with our loneliness and our connections to others, how we make them and break them and move on. Is the movie itself a metaphor for that, or just a movie about that? Also, the director does not agree that soccer is the opiate of the masses, exploited by the junta in this case to maintain calm. Hamburger is going for gray day/sunshine here, not gray day/opium. And having mentioned Manda Bala above, note that this whole movie unfurled without a kidnapping or fried frog in sight, but only because the whole country is under siege from an autocratic military dictatorship rather than a scourge of corrupt politicians and kidnapping-for-profit criminal thugs.Strangely, Hamburger's soccer metaphor gets turned on its head at the end of the movie. Irony? Another layer? Or just part of the movie that doesn't conform to a simple, stumbled-upon talking point? I thought about calling Hamburger and asking him, but nobody likes a wiseass.When the metaphorical army arrives in Michel's neighborhood and starts dragging young men out of their union offices in São Paulo, clubbing them and hurling them into vans while the boy's parents are in hiding, it occurred to me to wonder whether such scenes are automatically more powerful when filmed in the country where they are supposed to have happened, in the language in which they happened, by victims or the relatives of victims of the evils portrayed. Or, for a subtitle-hating country like America, could such a scene be made more visceral and moving if shot in Hollywood for U.S. consumption? For example, would Der Untergang or The Lives of Others have retained their energy or even gained some, if they had been made, shot for shot, in the U.S. with U.S. actors instead of Germans? Ennio De Concini tried it with xxAlec Guiness playing Hitler but I think we can agree that that didn't work as well as Bruno Ganz doing it. Being a cinema snob, I would say without cavil that it is intuitively obvious that the Brazilian version of the coup or the German version of Hitler's last days cannot fail to have an innate power, if well enough done, that a U.S. version could never match. But hold on. Summer Palace provides a dramatic take on Tiananmen Square and the events there in 1989, yet I've heard plenty of squawking (from round eyes) about its failure to do justice to that historic conflict. Would a movie about Tiananmen, made along the lines of The Last Emperor, fare better in the U.S? Could Gettysburg withstand a transfer to Japan; if Kurosawa made it, might it even improve in the eyes of the Japanese? Or in the eyes of American viewers as well? How to assign metrics to questions like these? It's easy to just say that the better the filmmaker, the better the film, for all informed viewers of taste. Do the French still love Jerry Lewis? Are Hollywood blockbusters still the biggest grossers all around the world? And children in movies - does the fact that the child is native to a country foreign to the viewer and speaks a foreign language have any effect one way or the other on that viewer? Rather than approaching these questions from first principles, maybe the thing to do is to evaluate a hundred movies or so, make a call on each, and examine the results for trends.And speaking of children, how do they learn to act so well? Or isn't learning involved? Teens act in high-school drama classes and plays - they're learning something there, I guess. They act in community theater, especially in locations where drama in the schools is being cut. Adults go to drama school, but often act badly in films anyway. And yet I see movie after movie in which children act just fine (Mother of Mine, Wondrous Oblivion, Birth, Kabluey (where the kids are caricatures, but good caricatures.) On the other hand, that kid in The Dick Van Dyke Show... ouch.). Is aging an antidote to natural inborn talent? As we grow up, do we lose our ability to act? Or are these children, who seem to be acting so well, actually not doing much at all? In TYMPWOV, is the boy mostly just running around, looking upset, and playing with his tabletop soccer set, or is he interacting with others and... well, acting. I called the Stella Adler School in Manhattan to ask these questions, but the woman I spoke to told me that the youngest students they enroll are 14-year-olds (eight Saturday classes from 10 to 6, $800. No waiting list.) I asked the woman if the under-14s I see in the movies have been trained, or if whatever they show is just natural ability. She could only surmise. I asked if the Stella Adler Saturday classes have produced some success stories; she said yes, but didn't name anybody I've heard of. She didn't have much else to say about younger children and their appearances in movies, so I called a school out in the Valley (Sherman Oaks) which takes kids as young as 8. Sherman Oaks is up the 405 from Santa Monica, just over the hills from Hollywood. The fellow I spoke to told me flatly that every young person onscreen today has taken classes. He listed graduates from his school now appearing in Desperate Housewives, Everyone Hates Chris, etc., etc. (Classes from 10 to noon on Saturdays.) Agents and casting directors visit frequently, nominally as "class assistants," but actually trolling for talent; or maybe just trying to make a living. For example:****For Young actors:Howard MeltzerHannah Montana Casting DirectorTV Intensive - Saturday, October 4thIn each class session, the children work on a scene. In addition, there is instruction in preparation, auditioning, so forth. Camps and career-placement services are available. I asked the fellow whether children start out with talent and then lose it, or whether talent is distributed among children in the same proportion as among adults, and if so, what the classes might add to that. According to him, we're all natural-born actors. As children, we play-act all the time, but as we age, we forget how much fun that acting can be. Acting classes, like organized sports, are just a modern way of letting children continue to have fun. And just as you won't be playing in the NFL or NBA unless you associate yourself with an organized program, just so you won't break into Hollywood without connections. Plus, I'm now getting casting calls for some reason.Hamburger claims to have auditioned more than a thousand children looking for his stars in TYMPWOV. When he found the boy and girl that he wanted for the leads, Michel Joelsas and Daniela Piepszyk, he changed the script to fit them. Joelsas had never acted in a movie before (like Magaly Solier in Madeinusa, who had never even been in a movie theater when Claudia Llosa made her the lead in her movie). Hamburger says that Joelsas had talent and other characteristics of his personality that helped him to compose the character, such as "his shyness, his introspection, his curiosity about life, and his strength." And his "intelligence and a sense of observation. And he had strong charisma. He's also got a certain shyness and an inner strength." Hamburger introduced all the children in his movie slowly to the characters that they were to play, perhaps Mike Leigh-like. There was improvisation. None of the kids saw a script during the shooting of the movie. So no acting class there, unless you count Hamburger's direction; TYMPWOV argues for inborn talent, but only in one in a thousand or so. “The way I work with them is the most important element. I treat them as intelligent people. They are not children. They are spiritual, intelligent human beings. What I look for in casting children is charisma and talent, but, more than that, I want smart people. There is a very natural sense - especially the kids with their reactions...We worked a lot to have this very natural feel, but there is a lot of work behind it.” So roll the film of Michel's audition. What the heck did this kid have to do when he came through the door, number 1013, with Hamburger languishing there in his director's chair, in order to get picked boss boy? Bark like a dog? I coulda been a contender? Put on blackface, fall to his knees, and sing Mammy? We'll never know. Now my niece - those auditions are brutal. She crawls on her belly like a reptile. They badger her about her tattoos. Surely there were tattoos in Shakespeare's time, weren't there, even if they weren't coupling ferrets over You Suck! in red and green on her shoulder blades?When I say that the kids were fine in the movie, I just mean that I watched the movie and never found myself thinking, "This kid is acting." What they were actually doing onscreen, I wasn't exactly paying attention to. Sometimes in a movie I do think about what the child is up to: when Cameron Bright gets into the bath with a naked Nicole Kidman in Birth, I found myself speculating about how that was accomplished without breaking any laws. When Dylan Baker has a talk with his son in Happiness, about Baker's pedophilia and his abuse of the boy's sleepover friend the night before, I knew in advance that Baker was actually talking to the air and his son's reaction shots were filmed later. But in general, I don't sit watching for signs that actors are acting, child or otherwise. Mary Badham and Phillip Alford in To Kill a Mockingbird? How much were they given to do? Can't remember. Scout narrates the movie, but as an adult. Are kids mostly asked to just look worried, or angry, or confused? How often does a kid have to laugh in a movie? What's the story on kid monologs? 726,000 Google hits for "kid monologs," including the following from Henry V:BOY: As young as I am, I have observed these three swashers. I am boy to all three; but all three, though they would serve me, could not be man to me; for indeed three such antics do not amount to a man. For Bardolph, he is white-livered and red-faced; by the means whereof 'a faces it out, but fights not. For Pistol, he hath a killing tongue and a quiet sword; by the means whereof 'a breaks word and keeps whole weapons. For Nym, he hath heard that men of few words are the best men, and therefore he scorns to say his prayers, lest 'a should be thought a coward; but his few bad words are matched with as few good deeds, for 'a never broke any man's head but his own, and that was against a post when he was drunk. They will steal anything, and call it purchase. Bardolph stole a lute-case, bore it twelve leagues, and sold it for three halfpence. Nym and Bardolph are sworn brothers in filching, and in Calais they stole a fire-shovel. I knew by that piece of service the men would carry coals. They would have me as familiar with men's pockets as their gloves or handkerchers; which makes much against my manhood, if I should take from another's pocket to put into mine; for it is plain pocketing up of wrongs. I must leave them and seek some better service. Their villainy goes against my weak stomach, and therefore I must cast it up.Wow. Maybe Michel laid that one on Hamburger.When I think of "bad acting," am I just reacting to bad line readings? In Son of Rambow, the boys have a lot to say and every once in a while I'd raise an eyebrow. In TYMPWOV, Joelsas and Peipszyk and the other kids are required to show their chops as follows:First twenty-five minutes: Michel (Joelsas) is the only child in the first quarter of the movie, except for a brief interaction with Hanna (Piepszyk). He plays by himself, asks his parents questions, looks out the car window at the big city and, by the way, narrates the film creditably. Sustains hugs from his parents. (As a child, I was hugged by a woman in a play once and I had to stand there and take it with a smile.) This is a good-looking young man. The camera loves him. So he walks, runs, waits, frowns at strange food, pisses in a flowerpot. It all looks real to me. I guess that's acting.Second twenty-five minutes: Michel gets slapped, runs away, cooks in the kitchen, kills time around the house. Now some face time with Hanna - mild dialog - but since I don't speak Portuguese, how can I evaluate their line readings? Rats. (And by the way, watching the movie, I mostly couldn't distinguish Portuguese from Yiddish; be nice if the subtitles would indicate which was being spoken - and ditto for Swedish and Finnish in Mother of Mine). At 39 minutes (out of 100), Michel meets Hanna's friends, three boys. They refer to Michel as the goy. Ten minutes of ensemble child acting; all five seem a little stiff, but they're just meeting each other for the first time, so maybe in real life they would be stiff. Will the stiffness persist? Now Michel settles in with his neighbor, the elderly Shlomo next door, and makes friends throughout the neighborhood. He's not asked to say much by Hamburger, but he does a lot of worrying about his parents, running around the neighborhood, so on. At the halfway point in the film, the World Cup begins. Third twenty-five minutes: First World-Cup match with everyone watching; Michel spending time alone again in the apartment; then with a whole crowd of kids - minimal dialog; back home at the one-hour mark. Second match. Polish Jew, Italian Jew, Greek, African, German Jew, Hamburger really pushing the melting-pot theme. Local soccer game. Narration by boy. He wants to be a goalie. Another World-Cup match (sees first with Shlomo, second at the union, third with the old women. Local kids game with Michel as goalie. Piepszyk gives him a gift in a one-on-one scene with dialog. Michel goes to synagogue.Final twenty-five minutes: The kids do an excellent acting job at a bar mitzvah celebration. And then some acting by Joelsas, as he helps a young union member hide from the army and secret police. Emoting, face to face with an adult! Some intense moments. Then more alone time for the boy, now coping with his worries in a more mature way than at the beginning. And the final soccer match, and more perfect-pitch behavior from Joelsas. And drama to wrap up. The boy has charisma, for sure. I believed him, from start to finish, and the other kids too.And lest I forget, every time a goal was scored, everybody whooped and waved their arms in the air and I wondered if all the women in Brazil were shaving under their arms in 1970. According to a Brazilian I asked, the answer is yes. Looks come first in Brazil, she told me, and that includes proper underarm maintenance.

Spout Post: You Can't Go Home Again (Mother of Mine)

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 02:45:44 GMT

Post By: joem18b
Post To: joem18b Blog
Post Date: 8/23/2008 10:45:44 PM
Body: In my capacity as a Spout Maven, I've reviewed a number of films distributed by Film Movement, including Mother of Mine, the movie under discussion here, A Peck on the Cheek, Be With Me, and Drifters. The promotional material included with the DVDs of these movies and the introductions on the disks themselves describe Film Movement as a film-of-the-month subscription club. Members receive award-winning foreign films in early release, by mail, "to keep," once a month. The films can later be found at Netflix, Blockbuster, or your local library. A nifty idea for some few film buffs, but every time that I hear about this club, I worry about its health and survivability. What kind of market can there be for a little club like this? How long can a company like Film Movement survive, if it relies upon a subscription base that is bound to be relatively small? Visiting the company's website, I saw that Film Movement now also acts as a film distributor, with theatrical, institutional, television, DVD, rental, retail, wholesale, in-flight, and emerging-channel segments. Larry Meistrich, who founded the company as a film club in 2001, has since moved on. I contacted Film Movement to ask about their move into distribution and how it now compared, revenue-wise, with the subscription side of the business. After some back and forth, the president of the company, Adley Gartenstein, was kind enough to update me on Film Movement's current direction. His response, in part: "The original plan was to be a DVD-of-the-month club. Now we pride ourselves on being a full-service North American distribution company with many creative and successful windows of exploitation. We still have a DVD of the month which gets an exclusive window, often before the theatrical. We think of it as a private preview club. But it is the smallest revenue generator for us. It is still important to us and we feel very devoted to our loyal members, but we have over the last two years put a lot of resources into building our theatrical distribution and our VOD channel. I am proud to say we have had our greatest box office success with our recent theatrical releases, and we launched a VOD channel called Film Festival on Demand which is available in approximately 9 million homes and we expect it to grow to 18 million during 2009." So I can enjoy watching and reviewing their films without feeling concern for them.Meanwhile, Äideistä parhain (Mother of Mine) is a well-made Finnish film that I enjoyed and that I can recommend. Solidly acted and beautifully shot around Turku, Finland and Ystad, Skåne, on the southern coast of Sweden, the movie tells the tale of a boy taken from his mother during World War II, who must adjust to a new family in a neutral country but then return home, fundamentally altered by his experience.The boy Eero (Topi Majaniemi) is called upon to look concerned, angry, pensive, and occasionally to ask a question or blurt out a passionate protest, and does it all well. I watched Birth the other night and Cameron Bright, another ten-year-old actor, comports himself well in the same way, including his time in the bathtub with Nicole Kidman. The dialog in Mother of Mine is limited, the expressions heartfelt. Eero's Swedish foster parents, Signe and Hjalmar (Maria Lundqvist and Michael Nyqvist) made me want to go live on the farm, too. I've got a soft spot for movie dads who stand up straight, square their shoulders, and with great sympathy say and do the right thing when it isn't easy to. Atticus Finch comes to mind. In my younger days I had a good friend who was a farmer. He didn't say much, but he was as solid as a rock and when he spoke, he meant what he said and he always made sense. Michael Nyqvist in this film reminds me of him.Eero's mom, Kirsti, played by Marjaana Maijala, provides the Finnish glamour. Esko Salminen and Aino-Maija Tikkanen, Eero and Kirsti in their twilight years, both seem sufficiently worn down by life to contrast dramatically with their younger selves. And what is it about Scandanavian husbands and wives arguing with each other? Have we been trained by Bergman to just settle back and enjoy it as the two of them go back and forth in that Scandanavian tongue while outside their mossy-roofed houses the wind bends the grass in waves on the förtöja?It says here that the movie is quite different from the book it was based upon. Or does it say that? Sample Google translation to English of Swedish webpages on the subject:"Härö not, in any case would like to condemn other people more closely than themselves. Haluaisin olla rmollisempi mutta toisaalta myös rohkeampi sanomaan stop silloin, kun tiedän, että jokin asia on väärin. "I would like to have Merciful but on the other bolder also say stop, when I know that one of asia is wrong. Haluaisin astua rohkeammin heikkojen puolelle.» I would like to enter braver the weak side."He's just sayin. The director Härö is in his thirties, whereas the author of Äideistä parhain, Heikki Hietamies, was born in 1933 and would have been the age of Eero during the Russian/Finnish conflict. Hietamies is known to include considerable autobiographical material in his fiction.And finally, this is a golden age for cinematographers. Having just admired Raúl Pérez Ureta's work in Madeinusa, I got to feast my eyes on Jarkko T. Laineen's Skåne. Some of these movies are so good-looking, it's worth putting up with any other problems in them just to take in the views.One question I did have: The boy goes from Finland to Sweden. He has to learn Swedish, which probably wasn't easy, as Finish is not an Indo-European tongue and completely unrelated to Swedish. There is a great deal of correspondence by letter in the movie - writing letters, reading letters, reading the letters out loud, so forth, shots of the letters lying around. Did Kirsti write in Finnish? If so, how could Signe read them as she did (the movie made clear that she didn't speak or understand Finish). Likewise with letters from Signe to Kirsti. I'm guessing that Härö skated over this one.This concludes my review of Mother of Mine. In what follows, I speculate about why the director, Klaus Härö, made some of the choices that he did as he shot and cut together the movie.Note: The movie features a busy flock of Skåne geese. These good-natured birds have lived in southern Sweden since the Stone Age and I was all awww at the sight of the notable fowl until while chatting with a relative from Ystad, I learned that, at least for him, the main function of the Skåne goose is to act as centerpiece at the family's annual Martinmas dinner.I was listening to a movie podcast the other day and one of the hosts on it opined in passing that there has never been a movie with bookends that wouldn't have been better without them. (Bookends are single scenes at the beginning and end of a movie that together serve as a framing device for the narrative, providing context or serving a variety of other dramatic and esthetic purposes.) This caught my ear for two reasons: I had just watched Flawless, an ok though silly movie that uses bookends to first misdirect and then uplift the viewer, effectively, I thought; and Chaos Theory, the bookends for which just provide extra time to enjoy the happy ending; and somewhere recently I heard or read that Mother of Mine itself included bookends. As I listened to the podcast, I imagined myself on it, called upon to defend the Mother-of-Mine bookends. Later while actually watching the movie, I discovered that while bookends are present, I was interested in all of the movie's non-sequential scenes, not just those at start and finish. I ended up noting all of Härö's chronological editing choices and herewith speculate on why he made them - why he arranged scenes in the order that he did. Was he shuffling clips in time to mask a lack of dramatic material, or to reset expectations in the narrative arc, or infuse the film with artificial nostalgia, or perhaps gin up a little auteur before releasing his small Finnish film into the Eurocinema market? *****SPOILERS ALERT: Various plot points are discussed below, in detail.*****First, the bookends: An onscreen notice informs us that during Finnish/Russian hostilities at the beginning of World War II, 70,000 children were sent from Finland to safety in non-combatant countries, most to Sweden. Then, the movie begins with Eero the boy standing in the woods, staring up at the stars at night. We hear him, voice over, now sixty, saying "Mother, do you still remember how it all began? How the war began?" Russian bombers approach and bombs fall. (At first impact the boy is startled and jumps so convincingly that the director might have fired off a gun right behind him on the set.) The boy runs to his mother and they cling to each other outside their home. Cut to present day for the opening bookend. Eero at sixty brings his mother a birthday present, late. It is clear that they are estranged and have been so for a long time. He tells her that he's been to a woman's funeral in Sweden. Quick cut back to his visit to a farm in Sweden for the funeral. We understand that he spent time there as a boy and that he had a strong bond to the woman who has died; his mother comments about this in voiceover. Härö, the director, is telling us immediately that war came, that mother and son survived it, but that something happened in Sweden to destroy the bond between them - the bond dramatized as they held each other during the bombing raid. Given the notice at the beginning about war children and this awkward moment between the two adults, the theme of the movie is announced: sending the children to safety was not to be all good. The leading bookend ends with a cut back to a time when mother, father, and boy were still together and happy.The movie ends with a trailing bookend, again mother and son: the old Eero, touching his mother's arm as he leaves her, signifying reestablished emotional contact after a lifetime, makes his way outside to look up again at the stars, and the scene fades into the original image of him as a boy looking up.In my last review, I wondered why some movies are better the second time around. One reason, or so I supposed, was that in some cases on second viewing you aren't waiting for something bad to happen when nothing bad is going to happen. You know what's coming and what's not coming and can spend your time enjoying the movie scene by scene, without, for example, worrying that someone is going to get killed at any moment. One way that a director can help the viewer get a leg up on such enjoyment the first time around rather than the second, is to serve notice up front of what to expect. Such might be the case with the director of Mother of Mine. Before the movie begins, he posts the notice about war children. Then he shows us the child of interest and informs us with the bookends that Eero and his mother both will survive the war and live out their lives. And so, with this introduction, we know in advance that the boy and his mother and his temporary alternate mother are all going to live through the war, that he will develop a bond with the alternate mother, and that he will become estranged from his mother. Perhaps this presages some trauma to him that will cause this fifty-year emotional separation from her. We do know that no resolution of their problems will come when he is young; whatever happened back then, it has taken the man fifty years to approach his mother with reconciliation in mind. In other words, the bookends are not entirely volitional for the director. He can start with a bookend or, at the end of the movie, he's going to have to do a "fifty years later..." jump to get to this resolution. The other, untaken, option would have been for mother and son to settle up while they were both still young. But with the bookends, as viewers we are invited to experience the unfolding film as one instance of the lasting bad effects of war on a child. Or so we imagine.And now, the other flashback and flashforward cuts in the movie and my speculations about them: CUT: Back to Eero's happy family time before the bombs fall. Having set the context, the director returns to the beginning of the story and the movie now proceeds sequentially in time. Father leaves to fight. Jump ahead to news that father is dead. Jump ahead from there to Eero being shipped out to Sweden. The movie moves forward steadily now in time, with no flashforwards and only three flashbacks to Finland that serve to emphasize how much Eero misses his mother and worries about her, and how hard it is to get a straight answer out of her about the dangers ahead. These come one-quarter, one-half, and three-quarters through the movie.Up to this point, the movie has fleshed out its central thesis with a variety of dramatic incidents, that thesis being, again, that in the fog of war, the adults try to shield the children from physical and psychological harm, in this case by (a) removing them to a distant safe place and (b) refusing to share with them any meaningful details about the actual situation at hand. Kirsti (the boy Eero's mom) and his dad (before his death) tell Eero only that everything will soon be fine and as before. However, children hear things. Eero hears of the Russian bombing of Helsinki. He hears that his mother is working for the Nazis. His overriding concern for his mother interferes with him forming any sort of connection with his new foster mother, Signe. The adults' refusal to share information with him is only exacerbated by what he does manage to learn on his own.A word on war children: The term can refer to children forced to serve in the army during a war (widespread in Somalia), children left behind when their soldier fathers go home (children of Viet Nam fathered by American soldiers; children of Finland fathered by Nazis), or children displaced by war, like those in England (the Narnia books), Finland, and Germany. The first of the Finnish children sent to safety in other countries (mostly to Sweden) left during the Winter War between Finland and Russia (30 November 1939 to 13 March 1940). At that time, most believed that Russia would easily invest Finland. Finnish parents feared the coming Russians and their mistreatment of women and children. In the event, Russia took Karelia and then the struggle bogged down and a truce was agreed. After an interim, Finland signed a pact with Germany, Great Britain declared war against Finland (but didn't do much fighting there), and with Germany's assistance, Finland took back Kerelia. This second phase of their war with Russia the Finns named the Continuation War (25 June 1941 to 19 September 1944). Russia and Germany saw it simply as part of the struggle against each other. Most of the children sent out of the country left as their parents returned to Karelia to rebuild. Finland later fought Germany in Lapland. Between 60,000 and 80,000 children were moved out of Finland during these periods of conflict, most during the Continuation War. (If the children were all as much trouble as Eero, 80,000 seems like an awful large number.) 20% never returned (about 15,000), because they had no family to return to, or because of concerns that Russia wasn't finished with the country, or because the Finnish economy lay in ruins. Of those who did return, a large number went back to Sweden during Finland's economic doldrums and Sweden's hot economy of the 1950s and 1960s. Studies conducted later suggest that the children who stayed behind in Finland made out better than those who left, psychologically. There were 2,000 civilian casualties in Finland during the war, some of them children, but a much greater number of the war children struggled to adjust once the war ended, part of their problem being that the country was unaware of any such problem. There is a documentary, War Children (Sotalapset)(2003) on the subject. The movie seems a little casual about chronology, but we know for sure that Eero doesn't arrive in Sweden before late 1942, because that's the year on Signe's daughter's gravestone. Yet after Eero talks to his mother over the phone at Christmas dinner, we're given a scene where the Russians bomb Helsinki and to me, the implication was that this was happening for the first time; that bombing occurred in December, 1939.To this point, one hour into the movie, the director's use of cuts to jump back and forth in time seem straightforward to me. He sets context at the outset by placing a scene in present time and he uses three flashbacks during his telling of Eero's story to emphasize the impact of events in Skåne on Eero's frame of mind. We have seen Eero grow increasingly concerned about his mother and her welfare, making two attempts to return to Finland, at the risk of his own life. As he tells Signe, he doesn't want his mother to die. But the director now jumps forward into bookend territory again. Why? The immediate impression is that we've reached a point of inflection in the narrative and this jump lets us catch our breath and serves as a semicolon: the boy now will settle in at the farm. The old Eero says to his mother, "You did survive, but I wasn't important to you." Puzzling. Where does this come from? He was obviously important to her, in every scene so far. Or does he mean that she didn't keep him adequately informed? "Do you want me to have a guilty conscience again?" she asks him. "No, Mother. That's exactly what I don't want." "Why didn't you ever talk about it?" his mother asks. Aha. So we now learn, in advance, that after he returns from Sweden, he won't talk to his mother about his experiences there. "I tried but you didn't listen," he says. Hmm. So obviously we don't know what's going on here. The conversation is essentially a foreshadowing. "Not true," Kirsti says. "I would've listened. I'm your mother." "You just wanted everything to be all right. That's what you wrote me and I never knew how you were doing." "You were only a child. You must understand that. I couldn't burden you with my worries. Why didn't you talk when you came back home?" she asks. "Talk to you?" "Who else?" "Don't you understand? You weren't my mother anymore." So. Foreshadowing. We've already seen that Eero is constantly frustrated in his need to know how his mother is doing back in Finland. Her failure to be forthcoming is the cause of what is to come, it seems. We'll now see how his mother's refusal to share her situation with him culminates in his rejecting her as his mother and taking Signe to replace her.Why this jump to what seems to be bookmark 1b? Why foreshadow Eero's apparently upcoming lifelong change of allegiance to Signe? Is this break in the nature of an intermission plus recapitulation? Or is the director unsure of his case and arguing for it in advance? Will Eero's concerns for his mother simply ebb now? Has he maintained his relationship with Signe up to the present day? (Recall that he's just come from her funeral.) Why come to his mother now to discuss this after fifty years of silence? Is Härö just reminding us that we're vectored in the end to this elderly couple, so that we don't come to the end of the movie and think "Oh, yeah, forgot about this part" when we get there? The answer is that Härö has a couple of revelations in store for us and needs more time to set them up than the end of the film allows, but watching the movie in real time, my reaction was "Huh?" All signs up till then pointed to a simple but powerful human drama, told without artifice. So that perhaps here Härö here is simply articulating what he has been showing heretofore - that Kirsti chose the wrong path in addressing the concerns of the child by not talking/sharing frankly enough with him. This should be the essence of the movie. Eero here implies that it is the essence, that because his mother would never share the truth with him, he finally transferred his emotional attachment to Signe (who, ironically, shared even less with him than his mother did, in the end). The director, however, did not trust this human truth enough to let it carry the movie, even though he showcases it here. Instead, in what follows he extends the lack of communication between adult and child into the realm of soap opera, ruining the film's chances for emotional greatness. It turns out, as we come to see, that Eero isn't talking as much about his mother's refusal to share up until this point in the narrative, as about a misapprehension that he acquires later on. Given that fact, the dialog in this interlude was a real head-scratcher. Quite a bit of plot machinery, relatively speaking, will be required to resolve it while I, as a simple viewer watching it, was still back on the farm with Eero recovering from his frantic attempts to escape.The movie proceeds, with Signe and Hjalmar learning that Kirsti has a German lover; Kirsti asks them to keep it a secret and raise her boy. Eero learns of this. After all his worry, he now learns that his mother doesn't want him back. He is accepted into the Jönsson family. Flash forward to see him at Signe's funeral; this cut is used in the same way as the three flashbacks in the first half of the movie - to accentuate his feelings and experiences when young, in this case by contrasting them with his grief at Signe's death.Back to his happy life with his new family. Signe swears that she'll never let him go. The war ends. A letter comes from Kirsti; she's changed her mind. Signe doesn't tell Eero. She struggles to keep him, but can't. He returns to Finland, unhappily. And so, now, one-and-a-half hours into the movie, in the final less-than-ten-minutes of the boy's narrative, Härö has one last opportunity to dramatize the effect of the war and Eero's separation from his mother. Eero arrives in Finland not knowing that his mother wants him back and not knowing that Signe only let him go because Kirsti did want him so badly. This information has been withheld from him. As far as he's concerned, an indifferent mom ordered him back and a promise-breaking Signe made him go. If the director had trusted the simple power of the situation, he could have let Signe tell the boy that his mother wanted him, and then they could have both dealt with their conflicting emotions, and Eero and Kirsti could have done the same. Or Härö could have let Signe withhold that information but then let mother and son have it out in Finland, with all revealed and dealt with at that end. But such would lead to reconciliation and healing and would undermine the whole point of the movie: that war children in many cases concluded their escape from war in a permanently damaged condition. Thus, the boy must refuse to talk to his mother and she must dither and let him remain silent, even though most moms at this point would force the child to discuss the situation presenting us with the scene we want to see and deserve to see without having to wait for a fifty-year jump for it to arrive, drained of its power by the decrepitude of the protagonists - the scene that could raise this film above melodrama. Eero confronting his mother with the fact that he knows about her lover. How could she be unfaithful to the memory of his father like that? How could she ask Signe to keep him if she truly loved him? And how could Signe, who also claimed to love him, now unaccountably send him back like this? The rage and grief of a damaged young soul, bared.But no. Härö goes so badly wrong from the moment that Eero steps off the boat, back in Finland, if not already by having Signe stay mum. Härö turns his back on a grand dramatic opportunity. Instead, he sticks with the machinery of melodrama, which dictates that there are things that Eero must know and other things that he must not know. In the course of the movie, he must learn that his mother is in Helsinki, not at home; that she's with a German; that she doesn't want him back; that Signe wants him desperately and swears never to give him up. He must not know that his mother gives up the German for him and tells Signe so.The children descend from the boat into the arms of their loving parents, with only Eero left to wait on the dock, isolated, for his mother's late arrival. None of the other children demonstrate any visible damage, as Eero does. Why his mother's late arrival? No reason. It's a cheap melodramatic) beat, not meant to show that she is uncaring or unloving or irresponsible, but to mislead Eero into thinking that she doesn't care enough to show up on time. It also suggests to the viewer that the mother is feckless, whereas her real faults in the movie have been, first, to try and protect her son by reassuring him in the face of evidence and fears to the contrary that he has nothing to worry about, when instead she needed to share more with him a fault that many parents would naturally fall prey to, and which might be part of an argument for not separating the family in the first place - and second, to fall in love while he is away and briefly consider giving him up - something that she then completely abjures, sacrificing her love for Jurgen instead of that for her son. So Härö does her a great disservice in the return scene, having her hustle in late for the return of her son, so as to unnecessarily ratchet up Eero's alienation another notch. (And by the way, the smooth return of the other children, with only Eero having a problem as a consequence of the knowledge denied him, undercuts the director's focus on the general damage incurred by the children because of their government's policies.) At any rate, Eero has nothing to say to his mother on his return, but instead of staying with this while his mother pursues it, we jump ahead an unspecified number of days to a knock at their apartment door. A letter arrives from Sweden as his mother prepares for a job interview. Eero answers the door. The postman knocks to deliver this letter? Eero tells him that Kirsti doesn't live there anymore. The postman is mildly surprised but takes the ten-year-old's word for it and mosies off, letter in hand. "Who was it?" Eero's mother asks. He doesn't answer, so as not to spoil the plot. "Eero," his mother says, conveniently letting that go. "All the bad things are over. Mother is here now." So much for confrontation. We're just riding along on the missing information here. The letter sent back, we learn later, contains an explanation from Signe of why she hadn't told Eero that his mother wanted him back, plus his mother's original letter saying how much she loved him and wanted him back. The rigors of world war and their lifelong impact on a mother and child have here been reduced to Eero answering the door instead of his mother and sending an acquiescent postman on his way. Did Signe try again? We presume not. Did Kirsti ever write to her? We presume not. Did the two exchange xmas cards? Guess not. In the present, the old Eero says, "I could never believe what you said. I thought you'd disappear at any moment. I felt I could lose everything at any moment. This," he shows her the letter he caused to be sent back, "Signe had always wanted to give me. She'd always hoped I'd get them. Or we. They came with the funeral invitation." His mother has never known that Signe's letter existed, or that Signe had never shown her (Kirsti's) letter to Eero. Now he's back weeping in the Skåne graveyard. and he reads the two letters. (As I mentioned above, presumably one letter is in Finnish and the other in Swedish. How did that work? We get glimpses of the pages but I couldn't tell if this was so. Signe didn't speak Finnish and I don't imagine she read it either. Did Kirsti have her letters translated before sending? Ditto Signe? Just wondering.) The director is cutting around here to mask the simplicity of his plotting.Bear with me now as Härö makes his final, climatic run at our hearts. He's locked in to the final cuts, forced to spin out the reveal. The cuts are dictated to him by his initial lack of confidence in the power of his basic story idea. To repeat myself: wanting to make his point that the trauma of relocation can have, and did have, a lifelong negative effect on many of the children "saved," he's got to pay for earlier turning to the shopworn and fundamentally dishonest device of denying his protagonist necessary knowledge, not once but many times throughout the movie, instead of relying on truth in life and film, to propel the narrative forward. So that, the true climatic moments of "Mother of Mine" having been passed by, their power unrealized, moments used as no more than plot highlights, Härö is constrained to juggle the elements of what is really just coda material as he winds up the clockwork that he hopes, unrealistically, will trigger that release of powerful emotion in our breasts that he... How many metaphors have I mixed here? Sorry, I lost control there for a second.Or, even worse, he had these cuts in mind from the beginning - this is the payoff that he wants - and he employed his gimmicks specifically to get us here.So. Eero stands weeping in the Skåne graveyard and reads Signe's letter, as we see her standing, looking like she did back when she wrote it, staring out to sea, and as she tells his mom to show him her (Kirsti's) letter, and that she (Signe) was wrong not to show it to him when it came (although actually he probably heard Signe and Hjalmar arguing about it, but pretended that he didn't), but that she loved him and didn't hink that Kirsti did, although later she came to her senses about that, after Eero was gone, and wrote this letter. Signe faces the camera. "Please, Kirsti, let him read your letter so he'll know." (We presume that she's sent the letter back with her own.) "And give up any hope of an Oscar." In the graveyard Eero puts the letter away and reads his mother's. "Dear Signe. There is peace now in Finland, which is a huge relief to us all. Hans-Jurgen returned to Germany without me." The elderly mother Kirsti, who wrote the all-important returned unshared letter, is now shown continuing to read it aloud as Eero listens. "The German loves me more than anything and I love him, but I have to ask myself whom I love the most?" Cut to Eero a week earlier, back in Skåne, staring out to sea after having just read this himself. Kirsti continues, voice-over, "I must've been blind and insane. How could I even consider leaving my own child? I may have to carry this guilt for the rest of my life." Now she's young again, looking out at us. "But I ask of you, thankful for all that you've done, to send me my beloved son as soon as possible. And you're right. This sort of thing blasts any Oscar hopes for us both." Back to the old Kirsti, reading. She and Eero eye each other. "60 years. a lifetime." "It sounds ridiculous, but somehow it feels that a part of us has been left there in Skåne. That's where I decided never to miss you," Eero says. I'm sitting on the couch regretting that last toke as I try to keep all this straight."But you did," Kirsti says. "I did, Mother," Eero says. "Now I understand it." Huh? Understands what? That as a child he had known the part about the German and Kirsti asking Signe to take care of him, but not the part about Kirsti asking Signe to please send him back, after which Signe made him go home even, as he thought, Kirsti didn't want him? Kirsti, Signe, and Eero are all just culpable enough, in just the right order, to replace a world war's blame with their own. Onscreen, mother and son touch. They're reconciled after fifty empty years, but I'm not. I'm still reeling from the sequence of rapid cuts, back then and now, images of the pensive trio, all perhaps wondering, like I was on the couch, HOW THEY AVOIDED TALKING ABOUT THIS FOR HALF A CENTURY. He never went back to Skåne? He never asked his mother why Signe sent him back if she, his mother, wanted to go with the German? But there is no point in asking questions like this because the whole narrative is artifice.These is a deep irony in this movie. Two mothers, one blood and one surrogate, love Eero. As a consequence of their own weaknesses, their actions taken together rob him of the ability to trust either of them. Only at the age of 60 does he come to fully understand this. Thus love, rather than hate or indifference, wounds him worst in the war. Love and a clunky script. See, if THIS - the letters - caused the problem, then it's no wonder all the other kids ran to their parents when they got off the boat in Finland. All this talk in Finland about alienated children - never happened - because the chain of events that we watch causing the problems is so unlikely. Perhaps the director did not trust himself to tell the basic story, with it's raw simplicity. Perhaps he made up his mind early on that the boy, in later life, would finally come to terms with the traumas that he suffered as a child. Whatever the reason, to tell his story, he fell back on, or was made to use through lack of imagination, a number of tricks of the melodramatic trade that perforce weakened the movie - its narrative and its impact. So wrong. The point of the movie is to demonstrate why the strategy of moving kids from their homes and relocating them in a foreign country did as much harm as good, and here, this is why? Because a Desperate Housewife/Hollywood Romantic Comedy sidetracked a boy's affections for his mother for fifty years? The obvious conclusion to be drawn by the viewer, then, is that it was a good idea to ship Eero out, if only Signe and Kristi had stepped up to their responsibilities as in real life they would have (or wouldn't have, but for more quotidian reasons).Eero leaves his mother now. Outside in the night, he looks up. He sees the stars. He smiles. Smile if you wish, oh Eero, but you're sixty, your mother is in her eighties, and Signe has moved on to make another movie. Segue fade to the young boy staring up at the night sky at the beginning of the movie. Back at the beginning. And this time, Härö, just tell the truth.

Spout Post: Top Ten Movies I've Seen This Year (Half-way)

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:50:39 GMT

Post By: JimBell
Post To: JimBell Blog
Post Date: 7/4/2008 12:50:39 AM
Body: These are the top ten films I’ve seen at the mid-point of the year. I think it is a good idea to post a semi-annual list because instead of complaining about mundane theatre offerings the list confirms that there are enough excellent films out there to watch. In no particular order: Mother of Mine (2005; Finland/Sweden)—A young Finish boy is torn from his family by WWII and later in life comes to terms with both of his mothers and how they treated him. Gone Baby Gone (2007)-- Dennis Lehane, the author of the novel on which the movie is based, says that we as a society have not figured out how to protect our children. The search for a missing little girl dramatizes his concern. 51 Birch Street (2005; documentary)—Doug thought that in his parents’ marriage, his mother was the loving and approachable one and his father was remote and cold, but when Doug’s mother died and his father quickly married his former secretary, everything Doug thought he know about his family started to change. The Italian (2005; Russia) follows a young, plucky Russian boy’s attempt to escape adoption to Italy and instead find his birth mother. Starting Out in the Evening (2007) develops two complex relationships among New York’s intelligentsia. The course of any kind of love never did run smooth. Sharkwater (2006; documentary) examines sharks’ behaviour, their importance to the planet, and our complex rush to exterminate them. Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) is a high-spirited look at how US politics works, and our tour leader is the extremely complex and always interesting Senator Wilson. Longford (2006) portrays the public struggle and the personal growth of Lord Longford as he visits in prison a woman involved in the murder of several children. Get Smart (2008) may be the funniest movie in theatres this year, and it improves on the original series by creating more well-rounded characters and more serious action. Elizabeth I (2005) transports you to London in the late 1500s and embroils you in Queen Elizabeth’s loves and politics.

Spout Post: Mother of Mine

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 18:39:32 GMT

Post By: JScott
Post To: JScott Blog
Post Date: 4/5/2008 2:39:32 PM
Body: Mother of Mine is a film that focuses on the unseen impacts of war. Eero [Topi Majaniemi] is a Swedish child sent to live in Denmark after his father dies in the war and his mother gives up on life. He is taken in by a mother who isn't excited to have him and a father who wants nothing more than for Eero to be able to adapt and thrive. He takes Eero to school where they call him the "war child" which is all he knows about his identity anymore. It takes over his life. All he imagines are air raids.Every actor in this film is much more than capable. Personally I think the acting is the biggest strength of the entire film. Klaus Haro mixes the strength of the acting with the natural beauty and depth of the Finnish landscape.I am in the camp of people who believe the flash forwards take away from the film more than they add. I think the story would flow better and perhaps have more impact if it weren't for the disjointed feeling the flash forwards evoke.I think this film would make an interesting double feature with Koreeda's Nobody Knows about a mother who gives up on her children and leaves them to raise themselves without taking their lives into consideration. There are many great films about troubling childhoods. Anything from Francois Truffaut or the country of Iran would be a nice start. I will also always recommend seeing Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout as it might be my absolute favorite coming of age tale. I also am drawn to its colonizing undertones.I think Mother of Mine fits well into the childhood genre and lives up to the high expectations I have for such films and for this film because I had heard so much positive reaction going into it.

Spout Post: Mother of Mine

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 18:39:08 GMT

Post By: JimBell
Post To: JimBell Blog
Post Date: 3/2/2008 1:39:08 PM
Body: Mother of Mine (2005) is excellent—a moving story and a sophisticated theme, and great acting to convey them. You’ve got to feel for a 9-year old whose happy existence is torn apart by the war—his father dies in battle, his mother gives him up (maybe needlessly) to be whisked away to safe Sweden where he encounters a “foster mother” who doesn’t want him. Through these trials, the boy is not pathetic but rather a feisty kid determined to have an impact. He tries to assure his mother that he can fix the war-damaged house, he builds a raft and tries to sail back to Finland, and, central to the film, he settles on a way of related to his two mothers (not to trust either of them). The acting ensemble is the best I’ve seen since 3:10 to Yuma last year. Young Eero (Topi Majaniemi) never over acts and manages to project a jejune masculine determination throughout. His Swedish “foster father” (Martin Nyqvist) establishes a natural relationship with the lad, not one of the too common I’m-a-famous-actor-working-with-a-youngster relationships. Realistically, the father starts out thankful to have a hired hand, quickly grows to like the boy, and then, when his wife becomes more emotionally available, distances himself subtly from the boy and supports sending him back to Finland. The foster mother, Signe (Maria Lundqvist) is fierce. In one of the best acting performances of the year, she conveys repressed guilt, sorrow, love, and a host of other emotions authentically while always maintaining the sense that this changing woman is an integrated, coherent person. Spout reviewer QFLW praises her performance, Spout reviewer Erico says the “great acting” is the film’s strength, and Spout reviewer Demndiary says the entire film is “filled with amazing performances.” The film’s narrative structure is strong but doesn’t work as well as it could. Spout reviewer Erico says the flash forwards into the present harm the movie so much they should be eliminated: “They shift the film away from the central focus . . of what it is to be a mother and puts the film in a more nostalgic tone.” This issue is worth looking at. To be clear, the movie is almost one giant flash back. The memories of World War II are triggered when Eero, now a podgy middle-aged man, receives an invitation to return to Sweden for the funeral of his Swedish “mother.” With the invitation, we later learn, came two letters that Eero had not seen, but should have seen, as a child. In the present, he shows up at his aged mother’s place and “wants to talk about the war.” Although she at first rebuffs him, they wind up talking heart-to-heart at the end of the movie. These “present” scenes are wisely shot in black and white. For Eero, the past and past mistakes are more vivid than his present existence. The black and white scenes would have integrated into the movie better if they had been shot in the same style as the coloured scenes. Although it is difficult to describe the differences, most of the movie is shot in a slightly blurry or soft colour, the lighting is flat or diffuse, and there are relatively few tight close-ups; but the black and white features tight shots starkly lighted. The black and white flash-forwards would also have seemed more integral to the movie if they had had more action. The flashback has a surprising amount of action, albeit from a child’s perspective, but the black and white is primarily a mother and son sitting and talking. I admit I don’t have a brilliant idea of how these should have been shot, but the most effective black and white scene was of the mother rebuffing her son, so if the truth about the past had come out in a more dramatic way than sitting and talking, the scenes would have seemed more integral to the movie. If you omitted the flash forward scenes, you would hurt the movie because they are crucial for the film’s theme. Spout review QFLW identifies the theme as “coming to terms with painful, conflicting emotions of the past and with the well-meaning but wounding mistakes both his mothers made.” The director (Klaus Haro), not always the best source for the theme a movie, writes for Film Movement: “The story focuses on the principal character’s lifelong battle with his suppressed feelings—in order to dispel his parents mistakes from his mind, Eero has to face them, and come to terms with himself and his two mothers.” This argues for a more developed present in the film. The only major weakness of the film is what Spout reviewer Erico calls the “the sweeping melodramatic score” which is “plain annoying.” Especially at the start of the movie, before you get to know the characters, the orchestra tries to tell you how to feel. Interestingly, during one of the most poignant scenes later in the movie, the music is a sparse, spare melody by a single instrument—and very effective. Mother of Mine was Finland’s entry in the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film. To put this in context, the same year saw the atmospheric El Aura from Argentina, the wrenching view of street life The Child from Belgium, and the stark moral drama about resistance to Hitler, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days from Germany. Mother of Mine can certainly hold its own in this company.

Spout Post: Performance Over Setpieces

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 01:15:58 GMT

Post By: Demndiary
Post To: Demndiary Blog
Post Date: 12/2/2007 8:15:58 PM
Body: Klaus Haro's Mother of Mine is a bittersweet drama about a Finnish war child’s childhood in Skane, Sweden. Eero is sent to Sweden to protect him during WWII and the consequences haunt him and his mother throughout his adulthood. The film portrays that same alienation of a stranger in a strange land as seen in Sweet Land. Mother of Mine is filled with amazing performances. Eero (Toni Majanuemi) is cold and lonely, and hard to reach yet still exhibits the innocence of youth. Signe Jonsso (Maria Lundqvist) performs well beyond her character. She is resentful of Eero and hides her secret why, but when she opens up is a loving mother without blinking. Michael Nyquist’s Hjalmar is a friendly father and male role model for Eero. He is a friend before father and humanizes the unusual situation. Majaana Maijala’s Kirsti, Eero’s Finnish mother, is stiff and seems directionless with a role that does not encompass the entire story. Haro sets the story in obvious set pieces, and amazing landscapes. Skane, Sweden is surreally beautiful with too green grass, and a seascape that draws the eye in. Everywhere in the town, and in Finland the set pieces seem painted like a school plays that, if not for the actors’ phenomenal performance, would seem amateurish. In conclusion, Mother of Mine is a schizophrenic movie. The performances and the story are breathtaking but the environment seems less. It is a tearjerker, but it lacks a solid punch all the way through.

Spout Post: Tug of War

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 01:33:49 GMT

Post By: QFLW
Post To: QFLW Blog
Post Date: 9/17/2007 9:33:49 PM
Body: Mother of Mine [Äideistä parhain]Directed by Klaus Härö; based on the novel by Heikki HietamiesThe title and cover picture had me wondering if this was going to be some man’s soppy paean to his mama. But no, it turned out to be a quiet yet quite affecting story about a Finnish boy, Eero Lahti, one of many Finnish children sent off to Sweden during World War II for safekeeping. Told in retrospect from middle age, after Eero’s Swedish foster mother has died, the film’s overall theme is of finally coming to terms with painful, conflicting emotions of the past and with the well-meaning but wounding mistakes both his mothers made.Eero’s father is killed in the war, leaving Eero’s mother Kirsti too distraught and worried about Eero’s safety to cope. It appears to Eero as if his mother has lost interest in him and abandoned him to strangers. When he finally arrives at his assigned home in Sweden, his surrogate mother Signe Jönsson, obviously expecting a girl, doesn’t seem to want him either. He doesn’t know Swedish, doesn’t understand Signe’s sharp criticisms, is understandably resentful and unhappy, despite the kindness shown him by Signe’s husband Hjalmar. Over time this changes, especially after Eero learns about the daughter Signe and Hjalmar lost. Eero finds out that Kirsti has fallen in love with a German, plans to return to Germany with him and wants Signe and Hjalmar to keep Eero. What Signe doesn’t tell Eero is that Kirsti changes her mind almost immediately, realizing she could never give away her son. Eero thinks he’s being forced to leave Signe to return to the mother who abandoned him in the first place and only wants him now because the German left her. The truth is revealed years later when he goes back to Sweden for the funeral and finally reads Signe’s last letter to him and Kirsti.The film tells the story simply and effectively in a pristine, uncluttered setting—the lovely birch wood around Eero’s home in Finland and the clipped green order of the farm where the Jönssons live (even the geese are surprisingly unmessy and docile). Straightforward, believable performances from the cast, including Topi Majaniemi (young Eero), Marjanna Maijala (Kirsti Lahti), Michael Nyqvist (Hjalmar Jönsson) and especially Maria Lundqvist (Signe Jönsson). She is the film’s true centerpiece.It’s all pretty to look at while deftly poking you with the many cruelties well-intentioned, imperfect adults inflict on children. Worst of all not being honest with them, under the misguided notion that children have to be protected from reality, that they are incapable of understanding or dealing with truth. Along with lying to them for selfish reasons. I was glad I had a fresh hankie on hand.

Spout Post: This Mother Missed a Few Spots

Sun, 05 Aug 2007 04:57:00 GMT

Post By: erico_77375
Post To: erico_77375 Blog
Post Date: 8/5/2007 12:57:00 AM
Body: It seems quite disproportionate that many of the films on World War II either deal with the combat or the Holocaust. Not saying that these aren’t important subjects, but there were other people who have had their personal worlds torn apart with strife, such as the characters in Director Klaus Haro’s Mother of Mine. It deals with the subject that The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe somewhat tackles but without much teeth, child relocation during the bombing campaigns. There are several differences in the two stories. In this one, it’s the Allies that are bombing Nazi-supporting Finland. And then there’s the most obvious difference, there’s no wardrobe, no Narnia, and no need for either. The film tells the story of young Eero (Topi Majaniemi), whose mother sends him to neutral Sweden when the bombings almost promise death to the young. He’s not very happy about the situation, already reeling from the loss of his father. He’s sent to the home of Hjalmar and Signe Jönsson (Michael Nyqvist and Maria Lundqvist), who have recently lost a child of their own. Signe is reluctant to care for Eero and constant remind him that this is a temporary arrangement, which the boy seems eager to make even more temporary. Hjalmar himself cares more for the boy that he really wants to and is constantly caught in the line of fire of his wife. There is the obvious little rebellions that come with such situations, both Eero and Signe feeling that they’re stuck with each other due to God’s spite. But as the world keeps tearing itself apart, they find comfort in each other. And then word comes from Eero’s mother as the war is ending; she’s found love in a German soldier who wants her to move to Germany with him. She wants Eero to be in their care permanently. There’s a great scene that makes the film where Signe and Eero understand each other for the first time. But then the German soldier leaves and Eero’s mother wants her son back, bringing us to a situation just begging to be played out between a boy and the two women who are his mothers. When the film was over, I found myself both pleased and displeased at the same time. Initially, my response is to declare it a failure, but the more I come back to the film, the more I find that the story pulls me in and that the performances are strong. But there is a lot of problems with the story’s structure and just how the film could have been much better, if the filmmakers would have more faith in it’s audience. The first problem is probably the biggest: intercut with the rest of the film are flashes into the future with an old Eemo and his older mother as he tries to discuss the events with her. All of these scenes, including the revelation at the end, should never have been in the movie. They shift the film away from the central focus of the story from the question of what is it to be a mother and puts the film into a more nostalgic tone since we know how the story ends. The revelation is aggravating since it lets characters off the hook that shouldn’t be. Another huge problem is the use of the sweeping melodramatic score that is just plain annoying. To the smart audience, they can tell that the film’s score is trying to lead them to feeling something and doesn’t allow the audience to find their way. Some people ask why are people more critical to independent features than they are to the more Hollywood-esque films. The answer is quite simple: Hollywood films are comfortable not only with big stars that he familiarity, but also the way it is shot and presented with cool professionalism. Independent is not any less of a film, but it doesn’t have those comforts as fallbacks. If something is wrong in an Independent film, there’s nothing to lessen the pain. Mother of Mine is the same in this aspect, though the film looks much more professional than many of it’s brethren. I must say that one of the great surprises of the film is the action. Take Topi Majaniemi, who has to portray some very heavy emotions in the context of love, hate, and fear, and he does so with grace. Take a scene where he’s overhearing about his mother and the German soldier. He doesn’t play the scene with his face, but his eyes. And when he’s working with Maria Lundqvist, they have some interesting chemistry. They make these characters real to the audience. Director Klaus Haro is a mystery for me. How can he see such amazing material and yet misread where the emphasis should be. And to add insult to injury, the black and white photography for the modern scenes is not nearly as good his color photography for the main action. I wonder if he watched Schindler’s List too many times. All in all, the great scenes in the film are REALLY good, worthy of Oscar. And even though the film shoots itself in the foot time and time again, you are compelled to follow these characters, to understand their situation, and accept that life is not planned. I just wished that the movie would have taken it’s own advise.

Spout Post: Mother of Mine

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 20:41:21 GMT

Post By: csprague
Post To: Spout Mavens
Post Date: 7/26/2007 4:41:21 PM
Body: Mother of Mine Directed by Klaus Härö. The plight of displaced Finnish children sent to Sweden and Denmark to escape the horrors of World War II are explored in director Klaus Härö's tale of a young boy failing to adapt to his strange, and sometimes harsh, new surroundings. Following the death of his father, nine-year-old Eero (Topi Majaniemi) is sent by his mother to live with a foster family in rural Sweden for the duration of the war. Eero is begrudgingly accepted by a surrogate mother who had been hoping for a young girl to help with the chores, and he's mocked by his classmates for his frightened reaction to passing planes. Eero's already troubled childhood is further complicated when his resentful foster mother takes it upon herself to act as a filter for his mother's incoming letters. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Spout Post: Mother of Mine

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 13:15:53 GMT

Post By: HairyLime
Post To: HairyLime Blog
Post Date: 7/25/2007 9:15:53 AM
Body: Last fall, we hosted a German Exchange Student in our home for two weeks. The first half of the period was extremely uncomfortable, for both us and for the student (and we're talking high school age here), both in the language and communication shortcomings, the cultural differences, and on our part, the feeling of our home being invaded by a stranger, and I'm sure on her part, the feeling of loneliness and disconnect from her own home and parents. But surprisingly, we managed to find common ground and understanding, and we were actually quite sad to see her go when her two weeks were up, having grown quite fond and used to her presence. Watching 'Mother Mine' this evening brought many of those feelings and recollections back to me as I was transported back to Sweden during WWII and the story of a small Finnish boy transplanted to a reluctant Swedish farm family, and the conflicts that arise when (eventually) the chilly reception melts and the inevitable parental bonding takes place. The Swedish 'mother' at first is quite cold and stern and we eventually find out why (although the audience figures it out almost 45 minutes before the movie eventually gets around to revealing the story behind her cold demeanor), and meanwhile, the film flashes forward to the boy as an adult wrestling with feelings of distance and coldness towards his Finnish 'birth mother' who sent him away during the war 'for his own protection'. Beautifully photographed, a bit melodramatic at times, and moves at a snails pace, but contains a swell performance by the actress who plays the Swedish 'foster mother' who has to deal with conflicting feelings towards this displaced child, and towards the mother who willingly gave him away, and eventually will want him back. Could have been a bit more moving and involving than it proved to be. I was reminded of other 'war through the eyes of childhood' movies that I have seen, some by directors reminiscing through rose colored glasses (Woody Allen's 'Radio Days' comes to mind, and John Boorman's wonderful 'Hope and Glory') or the more realistic approach of films like Speilberg's 'Empire of the Sun', or 'Diary of Anne Frank', or the surrealistic approach of 'The Tin Drum' or the recent 'Pan's Labyrinth' or even the strange mix of humor and horror of 'Life is Beautiful'. War in 'Mother of Mine' seems to occupy the margins at best, and seems more concerned with the interpersonal relationships of mother and son, which is fine, but rather diminishes the scope of the film, and the possibilities it might have explored.

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