The mothering instinct gets a sociopathically melodramatic makeover in Michel Franco‘s “April’s Daughter,” an initially engrossing but increasingly lunatic film that nonetheless convinced the Cannes Un Certain Regard jury enough for them to give it the Jury Prize this year. Franco is a clearly talented young filmmaker, and Cannes does love his brand of performance-driven psychological drama. His debut, “Daniel & Ana” snagged a Directors’ Fortnight slot; his sophomore film “After Lucia,” which centered around a devastating instance of teen bullying, won the top Un Certain Regard prize; and his third, “Chronic,” picked up the Screenplay award in the main competition. But “Chronic” frustrated the hell out of us by delivering an intriguing premise and a brilliant Tim Roth performance before nosediving off the high-board in its final act and belly-flopping in its closing moments. And indeed all three prior titles suffer from mid-story somersaults, by which the issues and scenarios that are sensitively laid out in the first act or so take sudden wild turns. “April’s Daughter” unfortunately confirms that pattern. What begins as a well-observed, quietly modulated study of teen pregnancy and the strains of young motherhood devolves abruptly into extravagantly nutty soap operatics.
April, ably played by Emma Suarez, despite the contortions required by the role, and who was allowed to fret much more convincingly over a strained mother/daughter relationship in Pedro Almodovar‘s “Julieta,” had her own two daughters young. This accounts for her relative youthfulness for a grandmother when her younger child Valeria (Ana Valeria Becerril) becomes pregnant. Valeria, who lives pointedly apart from her mother with her sister Clara (Joanna Larequi) in the family’s beach house, hasn’t told April about her pregnancy but Clara eventually does, and April descends on the household like a force of nature. She’s benign and supportive at first, but once the baby is born, increasingly convinced that her flighty daughter and her loving but similarly young boyfriend Mateo (Enrique Arrizon), are not fit to be parents.
These early scenes set up some well-observed relationships and details. The differences between the sisters — the lithe, sexually precocious Valeria and the overweight, awkward Clara — is pronounced and not just in their physical dissimilarity. Clara’s weight problem is touched on with delicacy and intelligence: its rare to see this kind of issue tackled so overtly yet uncondescendingly, and it serves to heighten our understanding of the different way the sisters think of their mother. Valeria’s sexual precocity allows her a measure of psychological (if not financial) independence from April that the shyer, dowdier Clara has not yet attained. And so with the introduction of April herself into the household, Franco teases a drama of minute family dynamics, in which the strains of parenthood on both Valeria and April are examined. As April points out to Mateo, her daughter is having a baby before the two of them have even ever been out for a drink together: this is a very specific situation that seems ripe with promise of generalized insights into motherhood, aging and the generation gap.
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But why explore those nuanced dynamics when you can just go narratively bonkers instead and have all your characters behave in more or less mystifyingly mercurial ways? The baby is born, and April starts to insinuate herself ever more into the new family’s life before, in the first of the film’s stunningly under-motivated twists, she uses her position as the underage Valeria’s legal guardian to unilaterally have the baby adopted away from her own daughter. What follows is too silly not to allude to but also too spoilery to describe. So suffice to say, there’s an enormously uncomfortable seduction scene and soon April is living in an entirely new set-up while Valeria pines for her missing baby and for Mateo, with whom she has more or less split up under the stress of the baby’s absence. Franco’s sudden reveal, at about the midpoint of the film, that the story is actually all about the compulsively disturbed, sexually jealous and deeply amoral April and not at all about her daughter (let alone daughters — poor Clara is all but jettisoned) basically sells all the film’s carefully mapped-out relationships, along with a good dose of its believability, up the Swanee. Instead we get a sort of upside-down Electra Complex story, and if that’s not a real psychological concept, it’s maybe because there’s nothing real about April’s psychology.
The Almodovar comparison, so eternally present in the form of Emma Suarez, does Franco’s film no favors. Because while a natural melodramatist like the Spanish master might actually be able to negotiate this story’s overwrought thriller twists and borderline campy excesses with vitality and verve, Franco’s directorial style is deadeningly low-key and restrained, to the point of austerity. He shoots at relentless remove, only very seldom punching in for a close up, no matter how much the histrionic behaviors might seem to warrant one. He eschews score and soundtracking altogether, and rarely moves the camera at all.
This style is all very well if you’re Michael Haneke observing a tiny exchange that elegantly summons the downfall of the bourgeoisie, but if you’re even a shade less clinical in your storytelling, and are actually observing a middle-aged woman getting all Mrs Robinson up in here in sexy lingerie, there’s really no excuse for such pious formal asceticism. It’s as though Franco’s instincts as a screenwriter — pulpy plotting, heightened psychology, murky motivations — are in a constant war of attrition with his instincts as a realist director. He shoots his lurid story with complete bloodlessness, like it’s Ibsen, when in fact it’s the feature-length response to the never-before-posed question: what if the nanny in “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle” was actually the baby’s grandmother? [C]
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