Russian directors Nikolay and Yelena Renard portray a complex mother-son bond in their Tiger competitor Mama. By Edward Lawrenson
A few years ago, Yelena Renard's grandmother told her about a woman she knew who lived with her grown-up son. The bond between the two was remarkably close, even supernaturally so: a dream that the mother had prompted her to prevent her son from undertaking a trip that would almost certainly have left him dead.
A version of this event is recreated in their film, which tells of the extraordinarily intimate bond between an extremely overweight forty-something man and his aging mother in a cramped, sparsely furnished Moscow apartment. It is an evocative, hypnotically staged slice of complicated family life, observed with watchful patience and formal rigour in static, long takes. There are a few exterior shots – in one scene, for instance, we see the son fascinated by skinny mannequin models in a shop window.
But the focus is on the interaction between the pair in their apartment. The tension and tenderness underlying the mother's and son's attitudes to one another emerges slowly and subtly in the Renards' quiet observation of such rituals as cooking a meal, preparing for bed, or – in one of the film's most poignant scenes – when the mother silently bathes her son, who sits on a special metal stool in the bath. It's a scene in which the contrast between the Renards' two actors is most striking: Ludmila Alyohina is slight and constantly busy with domestic duties; Sergey Nazarov is obese and largely inactive.
Nazarov's weight has, inevitably, drawn comment from critics who have already written about the film in Russia. “They call it the film about the fat man,” the Renards wearily observe. But they cast such a large performer precisely to underline his “helplessness and dependency on his mother.” Besides, Nazarov was an enthusiastic collaborator: “We found him on the internet,” the Renards say. “He really wants to act.” And he showed a commendable lack of vanity for his nude bathing scene: “In fact, he suggested he perform another scene half clothed too! We had to persuade him not to.”
In directing their leads, the Renards eschewed rehearsal. Alyohina, an established theatre actress, tended to be “used to large gestures, and so filming things as they happened kept things more natural.” This commitment to authenticity informed other stylistic choices: there's no music and minimal artificial light.
A sad postscript: Alyohina died before being able to see the completed film, although she did tell the Renards that it was among her finest screen performances. It inevitably adds a bittersweet note to the Renards' arrival at IFFR, but the couple are still looking forward to their World Premiere. “We looked at which festivals to apply to and Rotterdam was the one that we wanted to go to. So it's the only one we applied to – maybe it's a sign we did things right.”
More about Mama here.