Mocking the Doc - Part II

I don’t normally repeat myself, but I just finished watching Canadian director Carl Bessai’s comedic drama Mothers & Daughters and it is another mock documentary to add to the 2009 SIFF list. It’s also been pointed out to me that, technically speaking, my favorite film of the festival In the Loop is also (more or less – but I don’t totally agree) one as well.

Mothers & Daughters is exactly why I do not typically like this particular genre. It is everything that annoys me, sort of the familial single camera cousin to Crash or Babel or Crossing Over. While the issues Bessai’s film are concerned with aren’t nearly as heady as the ones faced in those pictures, its multi-character structure is, and as far as the format goes combining it with the mock doc isn’t exactly my concept of a good idea.

This movie is arch and annoying. Chronicling the relationship between a handful of mothers and their respective daughters, on the surface the movie is supposed to be about the bonds between parent and child that irrevocably shape their lives for both the good and the bad. But the film is so overdone, so shrill and cloying, I never believed for a moment that any of these women were flesh and blood human beings. The film felt forced and false, and the only thing I wanted while watching it was for the darn thing to come to an end (when 86-minutes feels like 186 you know you’re in trouble).

To be fair, not everything is a disaster. Actress Tantoo Cardinal (you might remember her from a variety of projects, most notably 1998’s Smoke Signals) is outstanding. She is the only one that seems to tap into her character’s inner essence and I never felt like she was acting the part. Cardinal simply was Celine (a professional house painter regretting past choices made in regards to her own daughter now being given the opportunity to help out a young woman on the verge of motherhood herself), a part of me almost wishing we could have seen a movie only about her life and have left the rest of the women on the cutting room floor.

Like I said, not a lot to say here. I just felt like if I was going to extol the virtues of a couple of mock documentaries I did like I should probably point out one I mostly didn’t care for. Mothers & Daughters is that movie, and as of right now it is the only film I’ve seen at SIFF I sort of wish I’d never taken the time to view in the first place.

And now... back to a movie I do REALLY like...