My Mother's Smile

Ernesto is a well known illustrator of children's books and does not believe in anything. One day people arrive to tell him that the process of canonising his mother has begun. She was killed years earlier by one of her sons, who is mentally ill. Now the family is pushing the cause forward and expects him to cooperate. Marco Bellocchio's real subject is not religion but institutions. Nobody in this film actually believes. Everybody is pursuing something. For the family sainthood is status, for the church it is a working mechanism, and for Ernesto it means the question of who his mother really was can never be asked again. Sergio Castellitto carries the tone alone: not angry, bewildered, and increasingly isolated. The difficulty is that the transitions between dream and reality go unmarked, some sections close up without a grasp of how Italian Catholicism operates institutionally, and the film settles nothing. Who it is for: admirers of Bellocchio and of institutional critique. Who it is not for: anyone expecting straight narrative.