La Disparition de Ma Mère

Begins as a charming and heartwarming love letter from a son to his Italian supermodel mother who made a social impact on the industry, but quickly veers into being a movie about himself and his own lifelong obsession with her. Much of the film feels more like a behind the scenes featurette for the finished product than a completed film.

If the lost privacy of a supermodel who cannot escape the perpetual spotlight of the male gaze is a central theme to the film, then constantly invading her space against her repeated demands to turn off the camera or stop filming only achieves to establish an intrusive and uncomfortable vibe for the viewer and artificially create the precise basis of her angst. Perhaps less honest filmmakers would have cut that footage out, but given the nature of the film's subject, it really just makes everything worse.

Despite her vocal insistence on remaining private, her son films her changing, taking a s***, and sleeping. I think there exist more delicate and respectful ways to pay respect to an elderly woman's poignant desire to disappear from a world in which her existence was defined within still images tailored to man's concept of beauty. Only at the end of the film does the filmmaker unveil his mother's responses to the existential questions he poses at the beginning (when this still had much promise).

Whatever this movie was supposed to be about was entirely lost in the creepy and violating manner in which it was made. The way it exists now, a good hour could be removed and it would still improve the film. I'd skip it.

This is either the cruelest act of matricide ever perpetrated on film or a deliberate attempt by a mother to make a "filmmaker" out of her no-talent son. It's difficult to tell whether Benedetta is in cahoots with her figlio from hell and acting the part of a cantankerous, demented, maladjusted, sporca vecchia for his benefit and ours, or whether this film is for real, and she is really out of her mind. In either case, the cruelty here is obscene. We see an old lady, wrinkled like a prune, going non conformingly about the business of life, coughing her lungs out from years of cigarette abuse, living in absolute filth, and admitting to hardly ever changing her bed sheets and not having showered in two weeks. You can actually, just from looking at her, smell how she stinks of body odor and cigarette smoke, and this isn't Odorama. It becomes impossible to develop any sympathy or empathy for her, or for her obsessive, abusive son. The film is as filthy as its subject. Skip it.