Vipère au poing
Based on Hervé Bazin's memoir, Phillippe de Broca's final film is excessively melodramatic but entertainingly so. Jean Rezeau and his brother's idyllic life in the French countryside is disturbed when their grandmother's death brings their parents back from Indochina. Their mother, a heinous bitch right out of a Grimm tale, rules the household with an iron hand while their father is apparently too intimidated to intervene. Jean won't have it, though, and a war begins between his mom and him, driven by mutual hatred and misused Catholicism. The brothers are joined by a third who had been born in Indochina. Of the three, Jean becomes the most rebellious, and for good
reason too. He drives his brothers also against her christening her "Folcoche" (mad cow). They go to extremeties as to even try and kill her by aggravating her mysterious illness. But she recovers again. After a particular incident where the mother cuts down his tree house, his last and only memoirs of his early childhood days and last resort of privacy, he decides that this woman here is not doing all this out of some kind of compulsion. He runs away from home and seeks out the mother's parents in the aristocracy of Paris. He finds that his granfather is a senator, his grandmother an e
ven more horrible version than his own mother, chocked with all the wealth they squander. He learns more about his mother's background and everything about her childhood life. Folcoche had had such a lonely childhood, devoid of parents as they were too occupied for her. She had grown up with servants, maids and chauffeurs all around, with not even a bedroom of her own. The monster is not the mother, its the grandparents who are the monsters. He comes back home, only to find himself isolated and quarrantined from his brothers. He is finally sent to boarding school by his mother. She still maintains the same hateful attitude, but now he knows why and does not rebel. Catherine Frot makes a memorable villainess and little Jules Sitruk holds his own surprisingly well. The film opens and closes in the present day Jean Rezeau's home where his mother dies a peaceful death. "Mother, you suffered so much to make me suffer!", he sadly says as she dies. I saw this movie and I liked it instantly. I can see why some people won't but I know that I liked it. Nice movie with a creepy subject so don't let your kids watch it.
reason too. He drives his brothers also against her christening her "Folcoche" (mad cow). They go to extremeties as to even try and kill her by aggravating her mysterious illness. But she recovers again. After a particular incident where the mother cuts down his tree house, his last and only memoirs of his early childhood days and last resort of privacy, he decides that this woman here is not doing all this out of some kind of compulsion. He runs away from home and seeks out the mother's parents in the aristocracy of Paris. He finds that his granfather is a senator, his grandmother an e
ven more horrible version than his own mother, chocked with all the wealth they squander. He learns more about his mother's background and everything about her childhood life. Folcoche had had such a lonely childhood, devoid of parents as they were too occupied for her. She had grown up with servants, maids and chauffeurs all around, with not even a bedroom of her own. The monster is not the mother, its the grandparents who are the monsters. He comes back home, only to find himself isolated and quarrantined from his brothers. He is finally sent to boarding school by his mother. She still maintains the same hateful attitude, but now he knows why and does not rebel. Catherine Frot makes a memorable villainess and little Jules Sitruk holds his own surprisingly well. The film opens and closes in the present day Jean Rezeau's home where his mother dies a peaceful death. "Mother, you suffered so much to make me suffer!", he sadly says as she dies. I saw this movie and I liked it instantly. I can see why some people won't but I know that I liked it. Nice movie with a creepy subject so don't let your kids watch it.
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