Mothers consists of three stories, a structure that the precociously talented Macedonian filmmaker, Milcho Manchevski, used to great effect in his superb debut film, the award-winning Before the Rain. Placed in three locations – Skopje, Mariovo and Kicevo – it is, as its title suggests, a film about mothers. But it is also about much more than that, as Manchevski composes a kind of report card on the present state-of-mind of his country.
The trilogy of episodes he has assembled in this always thoughtful, often provocative, and finally unsettling film allows Manchevski the freedom to wander through very different facets of contemporary Macedonia. The first episode – centred around a wilful and wonderfully independent child who, outraged that a schoolmate has been “flashed,” goes off to the police station to report the “crime” – contains a deeper sense of moral conflict. The second episode, which follows a filmmaking crew in search of old rural traditions, concerns two very old, flinty peasants. The only inhabitants of a village that was almost entirely abandoned, their ghostly lives act as a living thread to the past. And the third episode, by far the most disturbing, moves into pure documentary as it chronicles the shocking deaths of a number of women, all middle-aged mothers, killed at the hands of a psychopath who seems to suffer from a mother-complex.
Mothers begins with fiction, indeed with the fabrication of a lie, moves on to an attempt at the fabrication of a myth and ends in the shattering imagery of the real, where no fabrication is possible. Lying below the surface of all the episodes is a small web of fibs and betrayals, minor on the whole, but gaining an awful power in the final act, where a man respected by the community turns out to have deceived them all. There is no easy reading of Mothers, only a need for us to work with the filmmaker to uncover its many meanings. –TIFF
