Christophe Honoré's Ma Mère (My Mother) is based on the unfinished novel by Georges Bataille. It stars Isabelle Huppert and Louis Garrel who I previously wrote about in my write up of Bertolucci's The Dreamers. It's great but not for everyone but that could probably be said about all of the films I write about.

Here is the synopsis from the official site:

Ma mère takes place in the Canary Islands, where the film's family shares a home. The mother Hélène (Isabelle Huppert), cool and in charge, and her teenaged son Pierre (Louis Garrel), a pious Catholic back from boarding school, discuss his father's infidelity; the next they hear, he is dead in a car crash. Hélène launches into a wild series of parties, gradually involving her son in her drugging, drinking and sex-fuelled nights out.

When she mysteriously goes away, her son is left in the care of her mistress Réa (Joana Preiss) and Hansi (Emma de Caunes), an icy blonde sadist with whom he falls in love. As the film evolves, we realize that this is a period of initiation for the young man until his mother can return and fully bring him to sexual maturity and adulthood.

Huppert is always great and the fact that this film even got made with such an outstanding cast is pretty amazing. I mean, tackling Bataille is a tricky job at best and it succeeded more often than not. The film's main strength is the ability of it to transport you into Pierre's world of tragedy and debauchery. A classic Oedipal tale but with a lot less classicism and a lot more realism. Film is metaphorical though, a dream if it is done right and not to be taken literally, it's not a documentary. The characters literally act out things but they have mostly metaphorical or emotional truth. If you like Catherine Breillat's work then you'll like this film.

Bataille himself summed up the ethos of this work thusly:

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.

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