psychological detective with Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain
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Benoit Delhomme’s “Maternal Instinct” is being released – an unfunny “Desperate Housewives” with the death of a child and a mountain of other corpses in the scenery of the early 1960s. Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain play a duel with complete dedication in a psychological detective story, the main intrigue of which turns out to be who will put on the most wonderful makeup and dress up in the next scene.
They were inseparable, as were their schoolchildren sons: former journalist Alice (Jessica Chastain) and former nurse Selina (Anne Hathaway), who after marriage, as was expected in 1950s America, abandoned their jobs and devoted themselves to caring for the houses that stood side by side. side. One day, while digging in the garden, Alice saw her friend’s son reaching from the balcony to hang a birdhouse on a tree. She ran, began shouting: “Get off!”, burst into the house, which Selina was selflessly vacuuming at that moment, and therefore did not hear anything, jumped out onto the balcony – and then Selina, who followed her, saw only her friend on the balcony, and under the balcony – the corpse of his boy. Selina threw Alice’s son’s favorite stuffed rabbit into the baby’s coffin, so that the boy, bending down to say goodbye to his friend, would see it. And when the boy Alice’s birthday came, during the holiday, his grandmother died under extremely suspicious circumstances. Further – more corpses.
“Maternal Instinct,” as the credits insist, is both an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Belgian Barbara Abel (2002, also published in Russian translation under the title “Mother’s Instinct”), and a remake of the film based on it in Belgium in 2018 and all local Oscars. The success of that first film adaptation lies in the fact that the authors shrewdly moved the action of the novel from the present day to the early 1960s, when housewife wives spent their days stewing in the then hauntingly colorful interiors of their own houses. “What does she really think about me?”, “Why did she look like that?”, “Why did she dig around there for so long, in that corner of the kindergarten?” – where can all this paranoia flourish, if not in the minds of two women, maddened by round-the-clock confinement within four walls, surrounded by sofas and cushions familiar to toothache? The Belgians savored these cushions and sofas.
The American remake became the directorial debut of the famous French cinematographer Benoit Delhomme. He was made famous by Tran Anh Hung’s film The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), for which he recreated the turn of the 1950s and 1960s in the Saigon Pavilion in Paris. Delhomme developed special optics: a maximally defocused background, deeply laid shadows, so that the actors’ faces became, albeit dim, the only magnets of the audience’s attention. Delhomme has remained faithful to this lens for 30 years, no matter what he shoots. This is how “Maternal Instinct” was filmed – the debutant director remained behind the camera. The faces to which he attracts the viewer this time are not the first time he has photographed: Jessica Chastain he studied during the filming of “The Drunkest County in the World” (2012), Anne Hathaway in the wonderful film “One Day” (2011) by the Danish Lone Scherfig .
So they become not only the main, but literally the only attraction (considering that all the pillows are in the shade). To understand exactly in what form the actresses appear here, it is enough to say that in the American version the time of action is even more precise: this is the time of the election race of the future President Kennedy. This means pink pillbox hats and blue Jackie-style sleeveless dresses are in use, and the line of eyeliner goes far beyond the eyelid. In this makeup, Chastain and Hathaway become completely indistinguishable from two other actresses, today thoroughly forgotten, but in the early 1960s enjoying great fame. Chastain is Eva Marie Saint, although with the predictable in Chastain’s case interspersed, depending on her facial expressions in a particular scene, Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich. Anne Hathaway is Anne Bancroft with predictable, already in Hathaway’s case, similar inclusions of Liza Minnelli and Mireille Mathieu. But, as you can see, the inclusions also correspond to the era.
Looking at this strange flickering of the faces and habits of actresses of ancient times through the faces and habits of actresses of today is a hypnotic and gambling experience for a film buff. As for the detective intrigue, it is not at all as exciting – but this unfortunate circumstance is still entirely on the conscience of the author of the book. For Barbara Abel, “Maternal Instinct” was also a debut. And although the novel is famously twisted and even won the most prestigious prize in the French-speaking world at the detective festival in Cognac, Abel is still no Stuart Turton – and the promising plot was ruined in the most predictable and trivial way. Having crossed the middle, the detective story turns into a bloody psychological guignol: open veins, asphyxiating gas, guilt for the death of loved ones and the feeling of awkwardness that can be caused by people who have just experienced a loss are used. The ending, in which the two friends sneak and crawl around the house, is most reminiscent of scenes from “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”, where the great Bette Davis and Joan Crawford played the same paranoid hatred of two sisters imprisoned in the same house. That famous film was released in 1962 – it still seems very likely that Benoit Delhomme’s main goal was to be faithful to the era.
In theaters from March 28
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