Recommends

With 2017's Jeune Femme, her portrait of a modern young woman whose vulnerability becomes her strength, Léonor Serraille announced herself as a filmmaker to watch.

Finding the universal in the specific, romance in the ordinary and humour in the deadly serious, she demonstrated a rare ability for threading the needle between heart-warming fantasy and sobering realism. 

Now, the French director returns with Mother And Son which, like her beautifully rendered feature debut, conceals under its deceptively simple surface great depths of feeling.

Centred on a mother and her two sons after their move from the Ivory Coast to France in the 1980s, the film possesses the kind of emotional intelligence that makes you feel like a better, kinder person when you leave the cinema. 

It begins like an almost impossibly hopeful story of exile. Rose (the charismatic Annabelle Lengronne) is a young mother working low-paying jobs to raise Jean (Sidy Fofana) and Ernest (Milan Doucansi), her two children who came with her to France.

The other two have remained in Ivory Coast, and this is by no means an easy situation for the family. Yet Rose seems an indomitable force of nature, her enthusiasm about life in a richer country apparently inextinguishable, her trust that she will land on her feet and find love unshakable.

Serraille paints a moving portrait of a complex young woman who can find joy even in the toughest of circumstances. 

It is in the gaps between these moments that Mother And Son works its most spectacular magic. The film, it turns out, is structured in chapters, the second of which focuses on the eldest, Jean (Stéphane Bak), as a teenager.

Through his gaze, qualities that initially seemed positive – about his life and, most of all, about his mother – reveal their darker side, as he deals with the consequences of her choices, but also with realities largely out of her control.

It's a heartbreaking image of teenage angst and despair, as the young man struggles to find his identity between a country he hasn't seen in years, a French society that's racist even when it is well-meaning and conflicting values at home and at school. 

Featuring trauma, grief and disappointment, as well as hope and healing – the third chapter centres on a grown-up Ernest (Ahmed Sylla) as he learns to forgive, let go and help others.

To see him witness his mother's growing bitterness and his brother's difficulties to become a man striving to make peace with his past is incredibly moving. 

Rose is our throughline across the film, a presence felt even when she isn't seen. Like in Serraille's debut, this female character is imperfect but she feels real, someone who took chances and did the best she could at the time.

Spread across this intergenerational canvas, Serraille's understanding of how people really work – how good intentions can have unintended consequences, how we change yet remain the same – makes for a stunningly realistic film about the dynamics at the heart of any family.

Far from the "fighting/making up" clichés of lesser films, the family in Mother And Son is a constantly changing entity, its members growing, hurting, but also learning with and from each other – in short, loving one another.

Working with director of photography, Hélène Louvart, Serraille maintains a soft colour palette, lensing many hilarious moments. However, nostalgic it is not; pain and joy are too closely intertwined for that.      Elena Lazic

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