Comedy of Innocence (2000)

This is extraordinary. It's an easy movie to either like or dislike, because after watching it once, you might realize, or not realize that from almost the first scene, as the characters fade back and forth from real to incredible, you and one of the characters are being fooled into believing that something is real that doesn't actually exist. The two 'mothers' are one-of-a-kind beauties, and the child, Camille is played by a fabulous once-in-a-decade child actor. If you pay attention to the closeup of the painting at the end, you will become fully aware how our cine-reality has been compromised during the time we were watching. I was moved to order the book, now a set retitled, "Separations: Two Novels of Mothers and Children".

The late director Raul Ruiz has declared that what interested him when making films was the middle ground between traditional narrative and experimentalism. His movie The Comedy of Innocence (2000) is based in a novel by futurist writer Massimo Bontempelli, The Boy with Two Mothers, and recreates as in an unstoppable nightmare the archetypal fantasy of the child that imagines that his parents are not the real ones. The family lives in a strange Parisian house besieged by the remembrance of a dead incestuous eternal grandfather. The father is frequently absent, and the mother- theater designer- is suddenly refused as such by his nine years old unique son. Another mother, the ideal one that in fantasy every child wants to possess, will appear "really" in the world of the movie and in the video that the child shoots in that world. He harasses alternatively the two mothers with his camera. On his side, the director, perversely too, plays the same game with the spectators, moving the camera menacingly. We are introduced into two houses abundant in statues, paintings, mirrors, that duplicate "reality", and revive in us the ancestral fear before images of resemblance (those obvious elements of cinema) and some inanimate objects that seem to earn life. Ruiz has said in an interview that all his features, and he shot dozens of them, have "film" as their theme. The child uses the camera not only for reproducing but for torturing, and the mothers are ready to collaborate providing that the child will choose just one of them ( see the last scene, for instance). The need of possession and the anguish of abandonment succeed in impregnating each one of the characters, driving them to incredible behavior. The supposed legitimate mother (if there is a legitimate identity in the world of this movie) not only tries to recuperate her son, but to become even the fantasized mother. Ruiz plays convincingly with the impossible until a denouement that dubiously gives resolution to mystery. Like the young nanny who when throwing the dice gets the same results, the picture doesn't cease astonishing the viewers.

This movie is like modern art. Have you ever been to a modern art museum and seen a white canvass with a black line through the middle? I bet you have, and didn't say to your "arty" friend that you thought it was a pile of sh** just in case they thought you were not an "intellectual", well that's exactly how I felt with this movie.Typical French movie, the dialogue is just "how are you?" 10 minutes pause "not too bad" 10 minutes pause "my friend died" 10 minutes pause "really?" 20 minutes pause "shit happens" 10 minutes pause... Basically, there is no story, nobody really knows what's happening half the time, the only thing that keeps us going is thinking, well it's a French movie after all.. there will be some nakedness ... but nope.I would just rent it out again if I wanted to make fun of some pseudo-intellectual friends of mine who would probably comment on how profound nothingness is!

On his birthday a small boys tells his mother he is not her son, and that he wants to go home to his real mother.In some ways Comedy De L'Innocence feels like it comes from a different time of movie-making, perhaps the 60's or 70's. Certainly it reminded me of Losey's Secret Ceremony (1968), and Richard Loncraine's Full Circle (1977), both of which deal with loss, grief and relationships between parents and 'lost' children (curiously both films star Mia Farrow).All three films are populated with unsympathetic characters who behave in strange and unexplained ways. All three films have a chilly feel, both emotionally and literally. All three films focus on mother-child relationships, and ultimately all three films pose the question - 'what is real, what is imagined?' Beautiful but flawed, it offers no easy answers and leaves much hanging, unexplained and strange.