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Portraying saintliness isn’t a hagiographic directive, fortunately, in “Mom,” Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska’s narrative of seven essential days within the lifetime of a 37-year-old Mom Teresa. Undue reverence was a cost levied in opposition to William Riead’s “The Letters,” the final main narrative fiction in regards to the globally beloved Albanian-born Catholic nun who was granted sainthood almost 20 years after she handed in 1997, a delay Mitevska’s feminist Teresa, a half century earlier, would have deemed unsurprisingly late. As she tells off a cherished male ally in an early scene, the world is run by “males, males, and males.”
Nonetheless, as a consequence of uneven writing (Mitevska co-wrote the script with Goce Smilevski and Elma Tagaragic) that also does effectively to be concretely based on interviews Mitevska carried out greater than 15 years in the past for an unreleased documentary “Teresa and I,” “Mom” is on a mission that, its daring stylistic prospers however, isn’t finally forceful or persuasive. In nice half it’s because the interior turmoil that we’re led to imagine the central characters harbor don’t all the time inform the interpersonal confessions of which audiences can infer on their very own. What does come by way of is Noomi Rapace’s accessible interpretation of Teresa, with a punk rock alter-ego — if not a dragon tattoo — that delights even whether it is discordant, and her charged, platonic but intimate relationship with Sister Agnieszka, performed by Dutch actor Sylvia Hoek (“Blade Runner 2049”) who excels in shouldering the burden of the movie’s dramatic thrust.
Seven chapters in descending order construction the film’s story as a countdown of hiccups, indignations, and even a hallucination, a day every in a pivotal week that can decide Teresa’s future. When the movie opens, Teresa has been the Mom Superior of the Calcutta chapter of the Sisters of Loreto congregation since a decade earlier however feels she has outgrown her usefulness to the four-century-old establishment. She is anxiously ready to listen to again from the Vatican relating to her utility to begin her personal order, a privilege hardly ever granted to girls.
It has been a 12 months since India’s independence from the British, however to Mom, the struggling was equally immense earlier than or after the nation acquired its tumultuous nationhood. Essentially the most susceptible — ravenous youngsters, individuals bothered with leprosy, and pregnant girls with out the remotest chance of healthcare — all the time wanted tending to; that colonial actuality was intact. In truth, Mom feels she will save thousands and thousands of extra lives if solely the Vatican acknowledged her plan.
Credit score to the filmmaker that she doesn’t indulge within the poverty porn which many rightfully accuse different common movies by white administrators set in India ( you, “Slumdog Millionaire”). Mitevska does conform although to the favored creativeness of the acute devotion exhibited by Saint Teresa in the direction of the downtrodden. In a single visceral scene of complicated dignity, Mom removes maggots from a residing man’s rotting flesh. The macro twentieth century Western rhetoric about Catholic charity can absolutely be critiqued for not participating with the driving ideological function of caste, however that’s not the curiosity of nor the purview of this movie.
As a substitute, a poignant battle between the 2 nuns is. Mom’s turbulent self-examination is incited by the revelation of Sister Agnieszka’s being pregnant within the movie’s first Act. We’ve barely registered Agnieszka as a serious character till then, simply the trace that she is Mom’s chosen successor (her “primary”) ought to the Vatican honor her plea. Of their first scene, there’s playful banter as they transfer furnishings and debate the advantage of not being hooked up to areas and objects, at the same time as Mom casually confides in Sister that she “misplaced a toddler right now.”
Later, as the 2 mull over a handwritten structure of greatest practices, which embrace sporting easy cotton and visiting household as soon as each 10 years, emergencies be damned, Sister is compelled to share her secret. In an occasion of the movie’s many calculated if stirring framing decisions, Mitevska and DP Virginie Saint Martin cowl half the body solely with the again of Mom’s black veil, permitting us to give attention to Hoeks’ face as she utters the phrase “pregnant.” Rapace’s response externalizes 4 completely different beats, from a snort to a tear, astonishment to anger. The movie’s docufiction-like honesty is probably the most conspicuous right here: to think about that the Mom Teresa whom the world is aware of principally as a faultless octogenarian might need as a youthful girl had comparable intense moments of utmost conflicting feelings is humanizing, and beautiful. Right here a minimum of, we’re ready to know and really feel each girls’s ache.
Regardless of this construct up in Chapters Seven and Six, the remaining 5 chapters don’t all the time enable us to understand the warring impulses between the ladies. Sister confronts Mom about figuring out what it means to fall in love; using a illustration of a female depiction of God to cowl Sister’s face comes throughout extra as a compelled visible gadget than as a personality’s perception that earthly love can strategy the divine. A eating room scene which Sister vigorously enters whereas in some kind of trance doesn’t appear to jostle the opposite sisters who usually are not aware about the blasphemous scenario. A number of heated discussions on abortion, which needs to be fascinating as clues to the state of the talk within the 40s, really feel didactic. Notably, one later sequence, set jubilantly to “Onerous Rock Hallelujah” and which Mitevska closely adorns with surrealism, is jarringly sudden as a result of there’s little proof that Mom’s dialectic with Sister would engender the unconventional doubt posited inside Mom.
Thus quite a lot of the narrative believability of the principle characters’ dilemmas doesn’t all the time land. In contrast, Mom’s exchanges with Father Friedrich (Nikola Ristanovski), the movie’s key supporting character, usually work, as a result of they seem to own the sibling-like affection that Mom insists to a rumor mongering older nun they’ve. Additionally admirable are different craft parts, notably the digital camera motion in two inside rotundas to seize the characters spiraling; the lighting of somber dough making scenes; and using songs of religion in the direction of solemn worldbuilding, like when the Sisters minimize the hair of lachrymose inductees. As cinematic tapestry, Mitevska’s cloistered movie does really feel minimize from the fabric of Calcutta in 1948 and from the Catholic missionary work one attributes to that point.
One might argue that for a movie in regards to the cataclysms within the corridors of religion, there’s few leaps of transcendence in “Mom.” Nonetheless, the movie isn’t primarily about that. Mitevska needs to inform a story about two girls who attempt to discover widespread floor, even friendship, regardless of being on completely different paths. Mitevska additionally refuses to sanctify Mom Teresa greater than essential, as an alternative portraying her as a strict disciplinarian who believed in organizational practicality as a lot as within the inherent holiness of kids. As for transcendence, there’s a set of scenes when one character unexpectedly adorns pink whereas one other traces of blue. Not fairly catharsis however a change in face of what we laypeople would name trauma. Minor transformations resembling these assist canonize a grounded if pretty flawed drama.
Grade: B-
“Mom” opened the Orrizonti part on the 2025 Venice Movie Competition. It’s presently searching for U.S. distribution.
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