The Mother

Roger Michell is not a name that leaps to mind when one talks about the best directors working today, but maybe it should. Persuasion was the best of a spate of Jane Austen adaptations in the 90s, and Notting Hill is about as good as a frothy romantic comedy can get. Here he does well by a Hanif Kureishi script, with its characteristic candor and insight into the erotic lives of contemporary Londoners. It starts almost like a British transposition of Ozu’s Tokyo Story (a great place to start!), with provincial parents paying an unwanted visit to their upwardly mobile children in the city, in an excruciating clash of culture and family. But when the father dies suddenly, the mother can’t go home again, and intrudes on the life of her children, most grievously by involving herself with her daughter’s lover. Anne Reid is pitch perfect as the difficult woman in her 60s trying to imagine a new life for herself, and Daniel Craig (who is emerging as one of the best actors working today) convinces equally as the 30ish man who feels sympathy and something more for her, despite or because of the disorder of his own existence. Now we’re in the terrain of Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (a great place to wind up!), an unblinking look at the erotic connection between an older woman and a younger man, each character all too real. The result is well-wrought and well-judged, with a dynamic visual style and a strong emotional pull. (2003, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-72.)