The oft-abused word ‘controversial’ is applied to dozens of releases every year, but few movies in recent history have earned this label more than Hanif Kureshi’s downright creepy sex drama The Mother. As with his previous outing, 2001’s Intimacy, its highly explicit sexual content subverts the usual airbrushed Hollywood fare by depicting sex in a ‘naturalistic’, grubby and frankly off-putting light – but more noteworthy by far, The Mother is quite definitely the first film in living memory to feature graphic nude sex scenes in which the female protagonist in 68 years old.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, of course, at least theoretically – and the actress concerned, Anne Reid, deserves a Victoria Cross for her bravery in choosing the role over Calendar Girls– but the madness doesn’t end there. Kureshi’s film is determinedly eyebrow-popping at every single stage of the proceedings, with the aforementioned anti-heroine, a prim-and-proper old dear named May, conducting a clearly sick and depraved affair with her daughter’s boyfriend. Furthermore, the gentleman in question is a hideously hairy creature who has been hired to do building work in the basement of her son’s house, in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death.
Once you’ve gotten over the shock inherent in watching one of Dame Judi Dench’s immediate peers orgasm as loudly as humanly possible while being fucked from behind – she also develops quite an insatiable appetite for, er, mouthfuls of raw meat – there’s no argument that The Mother is a highly intriguing and involving piece of work, supremely well-acted throughout, and frequently extremely funny, as when Reid’s character exclaims ‘I thought nobody would ever touch me again, apart from the undertaker’. Cathryn Bradshaw also chips in a performance of considerable pathos as horny old May’s profoundly neurotic and unstable daughter, while Daniel Craig’s role as the willing young stud bespeaks a bravery that well and truly puts Nicolas Cage’s legendary cockroach-scoffing feats to shame.
Age-gap relationships have been examined with heartbreaking results in Fear Eats The Soul, and for brilliantly comic purposes in Harold And Maude, but never remotely to such unsettling effect. Whatever you do, don’t bring your granny and her bingo mates, or the shock will surely cause them to expire in their seats.