Mother and Son, review: a mischievous French drama, and a true surprise

In English-speaking countries, Léonor Serraille’s new film will be known as Mother and Son, though its original French name is Un Petit Frère. The two titles are equally applicable to this earthy and impassioned story of a young single woman and her two pre-teen boys who migrate to Paris from Ivory Coast in 1989. But I think I slightly prefer the English one, since it plants the seed of a question the film itself goes on to address: if not Mother and Sons (plural), what’s going to pry this snug family unit apart?

The answer turns out to be the long-form strains of the resettling process itself, which the 36-year-old Serraille and her cast depict with warmth and candour, and a thrilling poetic-realist spark. Their film has less in common with the unadorned, politically charged cinema of Ken Loach and the Dardenne brothers than with Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, with which it also shares a keen and tactile sense of time and place. In this year’s Cannes competition strand, it’s a very pleasant last-minute surprise, and could find itself among the titles at tomorrow’s awards.

Annabelle Lengronne gives a superb performance as the young mother Rose, who has brought her boys, 10-year-old Jean (Sidy Fofana) and five-year-old Ernest (Milan Doucansi), to live with her sister in the French capital’s suburbs, perhaps to escape the growing unrest in their home country at the time. Far from the needy émigré, Rose is magnetic and mischievous, with an expression that defaults to ‘impress me’ and a coolly assured way of moving through the world.

Working as a cleaner at a large city-centre hotel, she spots a builder on the roof of the opposite block: one cut later he’s in the room with her, though she teasingly withholds the kiss that will commence this tryst for as long as possible, instead playfully poking out her tongue and prodding the end of his nose. She works hard too: in another inspired cut, Serraille moves from her polishing a desk to washing her sons in the bath at home that evening: both at work and at home, the scrubbing goes on.

Rose’s sister tries to set her up with a single male friend who’s improbably named Julius Caesar: at a house party, he tries to woo her with a verse of Ronsard, and her attempts not to crack up are priceless. More bemusing still is an away weekend hosted by the millionaire owner of her hotel chain, whose family have been throwing these annual fiestas for employees since time immemorial. The break starts with hunting on the estate, and appears to unofficially conclude with an orgy: in a drily funny aftermath scene, Rose calmly extracts herself from a tangle of bodies, retrieves her dress and hair piece, and quietly departs.

Then there’s Thierry from Normandy, a married but childless man who’s in Paris visiting his brother, and with whom Rose shares another intimate moment on the hotel roof, with another perfectly timed pre-kiss pause. This clinch prompts a trip to the Normandy coast, where Thierry plays with Jean on the beach while Ernest watches his mother strolling aimlessly along the shoreline – a free spirit, finding her way by instinct.

Yet as the second of the film’s three separate sections begins, Rose’s come-what-may attitude shades into neglect. Her sons, now in their teens (and played by Stéphane Bak and Kenzo Sambin) are largely fending for themselves in a grotty Rouen apartment while she joins them at the weekend in breaks from work. The academically gifted but distractible Jean also shoulders the daily burdens of cooking and cleaning; his work suffers and personal life turns destructive. Yet Jean’s sacrifices enable the blossoming of his own younger sibling, who as a young adult (played by Ahmed Sylla) becomes a schoolteacher and furnishes the film with that staple Cannes scene of a young, enthusiastic pedagogue exciting his teenage students into philosophical debate.

Serraille, whose debut feature Jeune Femme won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2017, has returned with a film that feels like a jewellery box of telling moments: there is precious stuff here, and real sparkle too.

116 min. Screening at the Cannes Film Festival. A UK release is TBC.