Hafsia Herzi tenderly resuscitates her “Good Mother” and the northern districts of Marseille
“Good Mother”, a film by Hafsia Herzi.
© SBS Distribution
Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow
4 min
Before becoming Abdellatif Kechiche's favorite actress, Hafsia Herzi was the daughter of a cleaning lady.
With “Bonne Mère”, she pays homage to this courageous mother without a husband who made her grow up in the northern districts of Marseille.
This is also where the director returned to shoot this very fair story, both touching and universal, which comes out this Wednesday, July 21 in theaters in France.
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The first image continues to haunt us long after the film: an elderly woman, both tender and strong, gazes at the horizon through the window of her low-cost housing building in the northern districts of Marseille.
Between dream and reflection, and with a smile, this mother and grandmother has established herself in her family as the Good Mother, enthroned for centuries on the fate of Marseille.
With
Bonne Mère
, Hafsia Herzi, native of Marseilles, pays homage both to her own mother and to the neighborhood where she grew up, the northern districts. A successful double portrait, embodied in the film by Nora (Halima Benhamed, "
an immediate love at first sight
") struggling to make her large, very heterogeneous family exist and live. His daughter is fed up with killing herself at odd jobs and is going to try her luck in prostitution trying to reverse the reports of submission. Her youngest son spends his time gleaning, showing off and playing video games. There is the eldest son, currently in prison, for whom Nora lifts mountains to get him out. Lucky for her, there is also her grandson who goes to great lengths to be successful in school and stay straight in life.
Beauty through kindness
Hafsia Herzi draws Nora as a heroine defying her destiny and the obstacles of everyday life in this neighborhood with its population abandoned by the public authorities.
Nora embodies love through her emotions, beauty through her kindness and sacrifice through her unfailing sense of solidarity.
And she gets there, despite the fact that she literally sits on her teeth.
She has been in pain for months and can no longer eat properly, but she would rather pay the lawyer who promised to get her son out of prison than put the money in her dentist's bank account.
Nothing will make Nora resign.
Is the elevator broken again?
She goes up the five floors without complaining, because she keeps her breath to prepare lunch.
Is the neighborhood more and more dilapidated and neglected?
She crosses with honesty and righteousness the areas of thugs and drug traffickers.
His salary as an airplane cleaning agent at the airport is not enough to live on?
So she continues after her work with another job giving heart and joy to Liliane, an elderly person.
The inner life of a heroine
Hafsia Herzi has found the right recipe and the right way to handle the camera to share with us gently and with determination the inner life of her heroine and bring the northern districts of Marseille to the screen.
We felt that the director grew up right in front of the building where she chose to shoot this story that no one else has told before her in the cinema.
Modestly, humbly, by interposed clues, here the cry of a rooster, there a tattoo, she gives body to the characters, to the apartments, to the small drug and prostitution networks, to the streets and to rap, between pride and resignation , between hope and submission, between poetry and prison, between the districts of poverty and the kingdoms of the heart.
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