Once Upon My Mother, a new French movie that has just opened in Israel, tells a quirky story of a son and his emotionally charged relationship with his sometimes inspiring, often overbearing mother, based on a popular memoir by Roland Perez called Ma mère, Dieu et Sylvie Vartan.
The archetype, or stereotype, of the smothering but loving and nurturing Jewish mother is almost exclusively presented in popular culture as Ashkenazi, but in Once Upon My Mother, she is Mizrahi, born in Morocco. The film uses a quote from Rudyard Kipling to summarize its premise: “God couldn’t be everywhere, so he created mothers,” but local radio ads for the film say, “God couldn’t be everywhere, so he created Jewish mothers.”
It’s an odd but engrossing story, divided into two parts. It starts out with the birth of Roland in the early 1960s, the sixth child of a family of Moroccan Jewish immigrants to France. His mother, Esther (Leïla Bekhti), is a force of nature and the center of her family’s life. Roland’s father, Maklouf (Lionel Dray), and all his siblings are present, but the film centers on the relationship between Roland and Esther. Roland was born with a clubfoot, a condition where one foot points inwards and down. It can usually be corrected with an operation, but not always, as the movie shows.
While generally, people with this problem, when it cannot be corrected by an operation, still lead full lives with the help of braces, for Esther, it is a devastating blow. A cynical person not captivated by her charm and determination would say that she takes it as a narcissistic injury and is unable to accept that a child of hers is disabled in any way. She refuses to let him wear leg braces, and so he spends his early childhood crawling around the floor of their apartment, even when he is six or seven, and should be starting school.
Esther devotes her life to searching for doctors who will try to repair his foot, and when she can’t find any, she seeks out quacks. Roland, a sweet child, is not as lonely or forlorn as this description might suggest. He has his older siblings and learns about life by watching them interact with their friends.
The plot continues
His big passion in life is the pop diva, Sylvie Vartan, and he follows her career obsessively, listening to her records, watching her on television, and following her life in magazines. Not surprisingly, this ignites a similar passion in his mother. Social services representatives repeatedly threaten to take him away because she has not enrolled him in school yet, but she somehow manages to talk them out of it. They demand that she teach him to read, and she does so by using the Sylvie Vartan songs he has memorized to teach him to identify written words.
Her quest to get him walking leads her to try more treatments and takes up about half of the movie.
After a brief interlude when he has a performing arts career as a teen, the story shifts to Roland’s life as an adult, when he is in law school. Still living at home, Roland struggles to be independent but continues to be dominated by Esther.
You might expect that when he meets a woman, Litzie (Josephine Japy), whom he falls for, Esther would think that she isn’t good enough for her son. But Esther is so convinced Litzie is his perfect mate that she pushes aggressively for them to get together.
The rest of the film details Roland’s halting attempts as an adult to separate himself from his mother, and his success as a lawyer, which includes representing and becoming close to Sylvie Vartan, who portrays herself.
The first section of the movie, in which Roland is portrayed by several child actors at different ages, is far more intense and involving than the later sections. At times, though, I felt myself agreeing with the baddies from social services and wondering whether a child should be kept out of school for an essentially minor problem, which I imagine is not what Perez or the filmmakers intended.
The scenes with the adult Roland are greatly enhanced by the fact that he is portrayed by Jonathan Cohen, an appealing actor who appeared in the movie A Difficult Year, directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, and who makes this passive hero very sympathetic.
But the movie belongs to Leïla Bekhti, a young actress who truly captures the essence of this kind of over-the-top but caring matriarch, playing off her histrionics against her genuine devotion. There isn’t a false note in her performance. Her Esther Perez truly belongs in the pantheon of on-screen Jewish mothers. The family’s traditional Jewish way of life serves as a constant backdrop in the movie, offering a loving portrait of the close-knit Parisian Mizrahi community.
Francophone audiences will likely connect best to the movie. The more you know and like the music of Sylvie Vartan, the more you’ll enjoy the film, which was directed by Ken Scott, the Canadian director who made Starbuck.
The movie is fast-paced, with a kind of sitcom quality, especially in the early scenes. While Once Upon My Mother has its share of clichés in its script and plot, the acting and the basic premise keep it entertaining throughout.