Mother and Son film review — Ivorian immigrant story of immense tenderness

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Told with immense tenderness but also a beady, lucid honesty, this moving drama examines the shifting dynamics within an immigrant family of three hailing originally from Ivory Coast. Neither the dualistic English title, Mother and Son, nor the singular original French one, Un petit frère, accurately reflects the triangulated structure of the narrative which passes like a baton from character to character, building a nuanced portrait of familial love but also of neglect and pain.

We start with the mother, Rose (Annabelle Lengronne, scorching), whom we meet freshly arrived in Paris from Abidjan in 1989 with her two sons, 10-year-old Jean and five-year-old Ernest. (They are played first by Sidy Fofana and Milan Doucansi, respectively, then by Stéphane Bak and Kenzo Sambin when the boys become teenagers in the blink of an edit.) As the voiceover by the adult Ernest (Ahmed Sylla) observes, Rose has also come with a suitcase full of secrets, so we never learn exactly what happened back in Africa, including why she left the boys’ older brothers behind.

Those festering secrets compel Rose to seek out destructive relationships with men and make impulsive decisions that have serious consequences for Jean and Ernest. When we jump a decade ahead to follow Jean’s point of view, Rose is barely there any more. He, now 19, looks after his little brother and is on the verge of screwing up his own bright academic future if he can’t control his rage with Rose and, by extension, all women.

By the time we get to Ernest’s adult viewpoint, it’s clear that director Léonor Serraille has buckets of talent and a knack for revealing character and story through tiny, elliptical details. She draws out astonishing performances from the younger actors as well as Lengronne, whose Rose looms over the film like an astral body, exerting a gravitational pull even when she’s not on screen.

It helps that Serraille has hired one of the best cinematographers in the business, Hélène Louvart (who also shot The Lost Daughter and Never Rarely Sometimes Always). No director of photography is better at filming people in motion, and there are scenes here where the camera tells us everything we need to know just through the way characters are lit and framed, swaying and swirling to music, lost in the moment.

★★★★☆

In cinemas from June 30