The urge to flee is in the air. Scenes From a Marriage, Hagai Levi’s remake of Ingmar Bergman’s iconic miniseries, shows a mother and breadwinner, Mira, played by Jessica Chastain, as she takes on a temporary assignment in Israel, along with a lover. She is the mother as a womanizer and absentee. Mira tells her husband, Jonathan, played by Oscar Isaac, that she will come fortnightly to see their young daughter, justifying her plan with a hint of hysteria in her voice: “Men do it all the time and then, you know, it’s not really a big problem.” Unlike Gyllenhaal, Levi’s portrayal of care is with gestures, the child is almost always in bed, a suspiciously good sleeper. And unlike Leda, Mira doesn’t clean the slate. What’s interesting about the series, stylish and very sexy, is how Mira manages to live a bit like a man, mainly because of her co-parent, a man who explicitly cares, and the fact that there’s enough money to make up for the difficulty. It’s a fantasy of a different kind .
A mother leaves in Mike Mills’ new movie, “C’mon C’mon,” because her family obligations demand it. Mills’ film focuses on the other side of maternal absence: the child and the person who takes care of the child. Viv, played by Gaby Hoffmann, lives separated from her co-parent, who has bipolar disorder but is forced to help him through a psychiatric crisis. Joaquin Phoenix plays her brother Johnny, a ‘This American Life’-style radio host who voluntarily watches her 9-year-old son Jesse while she’s gone. This is Uncle Johnny’s first rodeo and he gets parenting instructions from Viv over the phone. The film shows us, especially through these conversations, that Viv is a committed, present and very genuine mother (“I [expletive] hate it sometimes,” she tells Johnny, before telling him to give Jesse some protein). When the film came out, I read that male critics respectively describe Jesse as ‘a handful’, his mother as ‘indulgent.’ And yet the film shows behaviors that are pretty standard in raising children. We see Jesse running away from his uncle in the drugstore and down the street, refusing sleep, rejecting his noodles in favor of ice cream. On the phone with his sister, Johnny complains about his inability to control the little boy “Welcome to my [expletive] life,” she tells him. “Nobody knows what they’re doing with these kids. You just have to keep doing it.”
Black and white and a little slow compared to the frenetic sensuality of “The Lost Daughter,” “C’mon C’mon” reflects some of his images: it’s partly about how hard it is for a small person. Unlike Leda and Mira, Viv represents a perhaps more common version of the absent mother, one who is no longer around simply because she has something else to take care of. It’s not quite a wish-fulfillment – Viv has her hands full caring for Jesse’s father, and she’s still coaching Johnny on the phone through his babysitting crises – but for once, the day-to-day business isn’t her problem. I watched with interest Johnny’s hiring another colleague as a nanny on site, and Johnny’s female colleague teasing him about postponing his work.
