Reviews of Mère Folle
Gérard Genoud, psychologist and psychotherapist, president of HAPAX, Rencontre Art-Science
First, there is that title ' declamatory, without an article, hence, without a nomination that marks the screen and the space ' MERE FOLLE. Then, there is a story that already is not a story, since death has done its work. And almost superimposed on it there is another story that cannot commence, intertwined as it is with the foundation of time and its origin, without any other marker than itself. And then there is the lady, the one who set all of this off. Neither actress nor psychoanalyst, she plays no role. There is simply her presence that seems to leap off the screen.
After those first few minutes, one would like to image that the film will never end. At that moment we are already caught in the bestaucasinosonline.com net of their history and our own; through the precision of the narration, the beauty of the acting, the magnificent mise-en-images, and the scenography that is so close to emotion. From that moment on, it is easy to imagine that this will go on, that the equilibrium of the initial moment will amplify, without us being able to predict where it is taking us.
For the duration of the experience, disorder is constantly present. It seems impossible to talk about this film ' one has the impression that it comes into being at the very moment of its projection. It is not a documentary, not a didactical project, not a fiction film. It escapes from this labelling by mixing comic scenes with mindblowing tragedy. We are forced to project ourselves into the stories told, not to take sides but to take leave of our certainties. For me, this is one of the great strengths of this film. It is silent about madness, about psychoanalysis, about the tradition. Yet, in an extremely sensitive manner, it holds a mirror up to us and takes us by the hand in an effort to go beyond the reflection, beyond appearance.
The actors seem profoundly humane, without play. They make space for words that come to them from elsewhere. These they carefully incarnate, in their own names and languages, and in the multiple resonances with other protagonists that are present in or absent from that polyphony. The words are not where one thinks one hears them. They are where they are enacted: in the magnificent outdoor scenes of which the backdrops are totally un-anecdotic. The film creates a grand narrative that both transcends and reveals everyone's personal music. The razor-edge mise-en-scène is dense and airy at the same time, without any gratuitous effects. It is like an invitation to abandon the search for a vanishing point or perspective, and instead to unfold oneself within a space where logic and the imaginary are not yet severed from each other, the moment after the big bang when there is as much matter as antimatter.
These interstices do not only lodge the body of the film, but also one of its central figures, Françoise Davoine. Constantly surprised by herself and others, she happily and obstinately draws her words that together attach themselves to those of the other like a fine string, so that each person can come into her own. In a roundabout way, this labour of love makes emotion spill over. The dike of its enclosure and its loneliness, fissures, cracks and makes the waters in its course turbulent. And yet, she never appropriates the story of the other. On the contrary, in her battle for life she is devoted to aggrandizing the other with an authenticity and a humility inspired by a determination to build bridges over the abysses of suffering and the seemingly absurd. She herself bears witness to those possibilities.
This is why this film is a political act that goes against the grain of our time. Indeed, it is a cliché to point out the individualism in which our histories inscribe themselves in our everyday lives. By contrast, it is more difficult to confront the contempt in which our societies hold any individual that is different. This film is a socially engaged practice that puts the other at the centre of its preoccupations in order to enable everyone to safeguard their dignity and build their own histories in relation to their choices and the dependencies on others. They are delightful because those do not suffocate, but instead reveal the remaining blind spots of our memories. This film is an act of resistance in the face of a society that incessantly promotes a democracy for the elites and tries to appease the people with subsidies.
This film demands to be shown to an audience as diverse as the splendid and elaborate cast. Watching all those names go on the credit roll, one already regrets that the last image no longer inhabits the screen.
Soheila Najand, Director and Artistic Leader of InterartLab:
Many thanks for this beautiful probing film which duly acknowledges the investigative process of the other. Apart from the interaction between psychiatrist and patient ' which results in some remarkable and memorable moments ' the film also has beautiful scenes which leave an impression of optimism on the viewer's mind without resorting to clichés. It's a good thing for Dutch intellectuals to be confronted with a film like this. In the Netherlands, anything intellectual is often shared amongst university lecturers only. There's no room for these kinds of ideas in the public domain, dominated mainly by governmental and commercial concerns.
For me, this film is also about the age of migration: an age in which normative acts acquire other dimensions in a new context. Another crucial aspect is the dimension of time. I've always understood time as intensivity of place. This film, defining the continuous, is itself defined as timeless. The work's multilingualism is a magnificent instrument for the representation of today's globalized and fragmented world. It challenges the individual to put together all the pieces she receives from her surroundings for the construction of a worldview and a position for herself within the world.
Maria Boletsi, Lecturer of Comparative Literature, Leiden University:
The film was a weirdly fascinating experience, unlike anything I've seen before. To me, it felt a bit like experiencing the force of barbarism in practice: as the force of a not (fully) decodable "language" (the noise and senseless sounds - the "bar bar" - of the barbarian), which can still affect, challenge, and shift our own language and intervene in our frameworks of understanding, without having to be translated in our familiar idioms. I think the supposedly "crazy" and irrational speech of the protagonists in the movie (which you can call "crazy" only because we cannot domesticate it, not because it is nonsensical in itself), makes a similar claim on the viewer. It invites us to give in to this world of undecodable or estranging narratives, and let our (supposedly) rational language and thinking be touched by "barbarian" speech in a way that does not appropriate the otherness by translating it into a coherent narrative. Looking for the "real" stories "behind" the dialogues in Mere Folle becomes an almost impossible and futile exercise, but it is this impossibility that makes the experience of the film so unique: once you let go of the tendency to make sense out of everything, you open yourself to a different way of watching a movie and relating to the protagonists.
First, there is that title ' declamatory, without an article, hence, without a nomination that marks the screen and the space ' MERE FOLLE. Then, there is a story that already is not a story, since death has done its work. And almost superimposed on it there is another story that cannot commence, intertwined as it is with the foundation of time and its origin, without any other marker than itself. And then there is the lady, the one who set all of this off. Neither actress nor psychoanalyst, she plays no role. There is simply her presence that seems to leap off the screen.
After those first few minutes, one would like to image that the film will never end. At that moment we are already caught in the bestaucasinosonline.com net of their history and our own; through the precision of the narration, the beauty of the acting, the magnificent mise-en-images, and the scenography that is so close to emotion. From that moment on, it is easy to imagine that this will go on, that the equilibrium of the initial moment will amplify, without us being able to predict where it is taking us.
For the duration of the experience, disorder is constantly present. It seems impossible to talk about this film ' one has the impression that it comes into being at the very moment of its projection. It is not a documentary, not a didactical project, not a fiction film. It escapes from this labelling by mixing comic scenes with mindblowing tragedy. We are forced to project ourselves into the stories told, not to take sides but to take leave of our certainties. For me, this is one of the great strengths of this film. It is silent about madness, about psychoanalysis, about the tradition. Yet, in an extremely sensitive manner, it holds a mirror up to us and takes us by the hand in an effort to go beyond the reflection, beyond appearance.
The actors seem profoundly humane, without play. They make space for words that come to them from elsewhere. These they carefully incarnate, in their own names and languages, and in the multiple resonances with other protagonists that are present in or absent from that polyphony. The words are not where one thinks one hears them. They are where they are enacted: in the magnificent outdoor scenes of which the backdrops are totally un-anecdotic. The film creates a grand narrative that both transcends and reveals everyone's personal music. The razor-edge mise-en-scène is dense and airy at the same time, without any gratuitous effects. It is like an invitation to abandon the search for a vanishing point or perspective, and instead to unfold oneself within a space where logic and the imaginary are not yet severed from each other, the moment after the big bang when there is as much matter as antimatter.
These interstices do not only lodge the body of the film, but also one of its central figures, Françoise Davoine. Constantly surprised by herself and others, she happily and obstinately draws her words that together attach themselves to those of the other like a fine string, so that each person can come into her own. In a roundabout way, this labour of love makes emotion spill over. The dike of its enclosure and its loneliness, fissures, cracks and makes the waters in its course turbulent. And yet, she never appropriates the story of the other. On the contrary, in her battle for life she is devoted to aggrandizing the other with an authenticity and a humility inspired by a determination to build bridges over the abysses of suffering and the seemingly absurd. She herself bears witness to those possibilities.
This is why this film is a political act that goes against the grain of our time. Indeed, it is a cliché to point out the individualism in which our histories inscribe themselves in our everyday lives. By contrast, it is more difficult to confront the contempt in which our societies hold any individual that is different. This film is a socially engaged practice that puts the other at the centre of its preoccupations in order to enable everyone to safeguard their dignity and build their own histories in relation to their choices and the dependencies on others. They are delightful because those do not suffocate, but instead reveal the remaining blind spots of our memories. This film is an act of resistance in the face of a society that incessantly promotes a democracy for the elites and tries to appease the people with subsidies.
This film demands to be shown to an audience as diverse as the splendid and elaborate cast. Watching all those names go on the credit roll, one already regrets that the last image no longer inhabits the screen.
Soheila Najand, Director and Artistic Leader of InterartLab:
Many thanks for this beautiful probing film which duly acknowledges the investigative process of the other. Apart from the interaction between psychiatrist and patient ' which results in some remarkable and memorable moments ' the film also has beautiful scenes which leave an impression of optimism on the viewer's mind without resorting to clichés. It's a good thing for Dutch intellectuals to be confronted with a film like this. In the Netherlands, anything intellectual is often shared amongst university lecturers only. There's no room for these kinds of ideas in the public domain, dominated mainly by governmental and commercial concerns.
For me, this film is also about the age of migration: an age in which normative acts acquire other dimensions in a new context. Another crucial aspect is the dimension of time. I've always understood time as intensivity of place. This film, defining the continuous, is itself defined as timeless. The work's multilingualism is a magnificent instrument for the representation of today's globalized and fragmented world. It challenges the individual to put together all the pieces she receives from her surroundings for the construction of a worldview and a position for herself within the world.
Maria Boletsi, Lecturer of Comparative Literature, Leiden University:
The film was a weirdly fascinating experience, unlike anything I've seen before. To me, it felt a bit like experiencing the force of barbarism in practice: as the force of a not (fully) decodable "language" (the noise and senseless sounds - the "bar bar" - of the barbarian), which can still affect, challenge, and shift our own language and intervene in our frameworks of understanding, without having to be translated in our familiar idioms. I think the supposedly "crazy" and irrational speech of the protagonists in the movie (which you can call "crazy" only because we cannot domesticate it, not because it is nonsensical in itself), makes a similar claim on the viewer. It invites us to give in to this world of undecodable or estranging narratives, and let our (supposedly) rational language and thinking be touched by "barbarian" speech in a way that does not appropriate the otherness by translating it into a coherent narrative. Looking for the "real" stories "behind" the dialogues in Mere Folle becomes an almost impossible and futile exercise, but it is this impossibility that makes the experience of the film so unique: once you let go of the tendency to make sense out of everything, you open yourself to a different way of watching a movie and relating to the protagonists.
Amir Eshel, Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, Stanford University:
Blending a moving story, remarkable visual images and philosophical reflection, Mère Folle belongs to the aesthetic tradition that gave us the novels of Thomas Mann, Albert Camus or Milan Kundera; the cinematic work of Alain Resnais or Alexander Kluge. Following Françoise Davoine's 1998 book by the same name, this cinematic essay crisscrosses contemporary Europe to present a figure of the continent's unconscious: its religious and cultural iconographies, heritage of inclusion and exclusion, tensions between Enlightenment and Romanticism, and harrowing legacy of the World Wars.
Exploring the fault line of reason/madness, Mère Folle rethinks, at the same time, one of the most powerful intellectual innovations of the last hundred years: psychoanalysis. Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker ask what role psychoanalysis may have in the twenty-first century. Their answer is one of this movie's most notable achievements: the past is not just a burden that threatens to crush us under its weight, but could also serve as the source we may draw on when we consider who we are and who we may become. As the numerous characters of Mère Folle struggle to cope with the personal and historical traumas that shaped them, they also use their histories creatively to evolve. The filmmakers suggest that we need to rethink some of our central ideas about psychoanalysis; to conceive it not as a retrospective protocol of excavation alone, but also as a productive process by which we weave the past, present and future into new life-narratives. So-called mad people present to the ostensible sane the possibility of learning to live a fuller life. A life that is not confined to the static notions of the past as opposed to the present, the normal as 'the other' of the anomalous, the lucid as the inverse of the insane. Finally, Mère Folle is a profound meditation on loss and the human capacity to sustain its pains through empathy, inter-personal dialogue, and the arts.
Robyn Warhol, Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English'Director, Project Narrative, Ohio State University
Viewing Mère Folle has had the lasting effect of changing my way of 'thinking about people who are mad, crazy, out of their minds, insane. 'The change came not through argument or exposition, but affectively. 'The repeated spectacle of Françoise Davoine, playing herself, looking 'with love and genuine curiosity at the insane people who talk with 'her, moved me deeply. She watches their mad capers with delight, 'laughs at their outrageous statements as if they were clever jokes, 'and listens with complete absorption when they speak to her from 'inside their idiosyncratic interior worlds. She shows no fear of 'slipping over the boundaries between her sanity and their madness; 'like the best kind of parent, she is absolutely clear about where she 'ends and they begin. She is in that sense a kind of Mère Folle herself, not a crazy mother, but an ideal mother to the crazy, a 'mother who loves them exactly as they are. As the focal character of 'this complex and challenging film, Françoise Davoine models an 'intersubjective relation to people who are spectacularly mad. Making 'a spectacle of that relationship, Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams 'Gamaker offer their audiences an opportunity to emulate it, not only 'as viewers but as subjects who inevitably encounter mad people in the 'world outside the film.
