gbill-74877

Julien Duvivier's camera is often wonderfully alive in this film, gliding and zooming around while maintaining beautiful shot compositions, which was one of the highlights of his final silent effort. Maria Jacobini is another, playing the middle-aged woman stuck in a loveless marriage, conveying such emotion with her expressions, and really bringing to mind Gloria Swanson's line from Sunset Boulevard, "We had faces then!"

The woman's husband makes her feel old, completely deflating her with the snide comment "Perfectly ridiculous, this outfit, for a woman of your age," referring to a very cute feathery number which included a hat that looked like a bird's head. Meanwhile, the young man (Francis Lederer) she meets at a masked ball makes her feel alive, with that deep stare of desire, their swirling dance, and an illicit kiss. This was when the film was its best, and the montage of people having fun at the party included lots of little moments and gestures, fully conveying the revelry at the time, and when seen nearly a hundred years later, that people of generations gone by were once alive and gloriously young too.

This desire for a younger man has an added degree of spice when we find out that the young man she's now obsessed with is her son's friend, and moreover, that he has to leave for Algeria for two years with the army. I loved how empowered she was when she left her family, including a younger son, but it was at this point that the film began lagging with the military exercises, even if seeing the host of camels and the landscapes held a degree of appeal. I have to also say, while it was inevitable that trouble of some form was bound to happen, I didn't like how the story played out, which felt like a punishment of sorts to the woman, and the husband suddenly a magnanimous guy. Hélène Hallier was fine in her own right as the younger woman, but I just wish the film had been a little compressed, and some other more interesting fate had been in story for Mother Hummingbird.

The beginning to this film is rather sluggish, though it is effective in immersing us into this (fictional) remote town in northeast Brazil. I liked how it then unfolded into the town being under siege from a group of foreigners led by a sociopath (75-year-old Udo Kier), how they were there for sport, and how some locals were complicit. The symbolism isn't exactly subtle, but it did lead to some fine moments of tension and a sense of resilience in the locals, who arm themselves with both psychotropic drugs and old guns pulled from the wall of their museum. I don't know if it had quite enough complexity in where it went from there to truly love it, but the ending was certainly cathartic.

Maddening at times and contrived at others, this is far from a perfect film, but it was entertaining, and the performances from Domhnall Gleeson (the sleazy drug dealer) and Sydney Sweeney (the rage-filled junkie of a daughter) are quite good. The first twist has a tip-off and you may howl at just how far a mother will go for her daughter, but the second twist was clever and cathartic, even if Michael Pearce felt a need to over-explain everything. Not a big fan of the ending though; I think it would have been better darker, without the attempt at tugging on the heartstrings, which was undeserved.