The Disappearance of My Mother, 2019.
Directed by Beniamino Barrese.
Starring Beniamino Barrese and Benedetta Barzini.
SYNOPSIS:
A once-iconic fashion model strives to escape the world of images and disappear for good, but her son’s determination to make a final film about her sparks an unexpected collaboration and confrontation with the camera’s gaze.
Beniamino Barrese’s deeply intimate directorial debut is a beguiling mix of film-as-therapy and gimmick-doc, and while its self-affected construction will prove too cutesy for many, there is at least a provocative examination of a fascinating figure at its core.
Barrese’s subject is his own mother, Benedetta Barzini, a celebrated 1960s Italian model who later became a journalist and academic, using her platform to criticise the modern fashion industry’s misogyny and perceived superficiality. Between her concerns about the world and persistent health issues, Barzini has today developed crushing existential ennui, to the extent that she informs her son she wishes to disengage from society and disappear entirely.
The exactitude of what she’s implying isn’t clear to begin with, much to her son’s distress, and so he attempts to create a film that will use a camera for good, to show the world who his mother, the human being, really is and prevent her from taking her threatened leave.
The overwhelming majority of Barrese’s film lilts between archive footage of his mother working in the fashion ‘biz in her youth, and present-day interviews with the woman herself. And despite the film’s melodrama-baiting formal conceit, Barzini proves a richly compelling figure from start to finish, musing as she does on the limitations of what a camera can capture as it, in her words, “freezes the subject within a strict boundary.”
Not only does Barzini feel as though she’s never been truly photographed despite her many high-profile pictorials over the years, she’s become disillusioned with a society she sees as selfish and driven by both money and image. Her anxious son, our shepherd through this existential minefield, hopes to keep her residing within society by capturing her in all of her 70-something-year-old glory, with the fake eyelashes gone and the glamourous outfits no more than a distant glow in her rear-view.
The project as a whole is created much to Barzini’s own frustration, though, and numerous passages of this film see mother quite understandably shouting at her son to put the camera down and engage with her person-to-person. The irony of Barrese’s desperation to have his mother be “seen” by the world for the first time is that this meta-narrative between mother and son ends up covered in a layer, thin thought it might be, of over-egged contrivance and artifice.
Barrese’s motivation to prevent his mother from heading into exile may be sincere, yet the urgency never quite feels palpable from Barzini herself. As such, Barrese’s attempts to more-or-less set a dramatic ticking clock sometimes come across as manufactured, rendering him a frustrating documentarian who relentlessly harasses a charming and intelligent woman in her twilight years.
But again, Barzini is thankfully the primary focus, and her thoughtful musings on mortality, a superficial society, the role of women and the male gaze-led nature of both fashion and advertising (and everything else) are transfixing in even the more prolonged talking heads segments.
Barzini’s captivating presence holds the screen, even being a million miles away from her glitzy former career; it’s easy to see why the industry fell in love with her in her youth, and to her credit, she’s reinvented herself in an entirely singular way. Thanks to some smart editing choices, the juxtaposition of her beautiful youth with her current melancholic ruminations on life, death and ageing proves subtly poignant.
There’s enough humanity here that Barrese really didn’t need to play such a hard sell with the eye-catching title and excessive follow-through, yet the triumph of his mother’s personality makes the film work regardless.
The Disappearance of My Mother is encumbered by its conceited format, yet nevertheless affords viewers a welcome opportunity to speculate on the artifice and dysfunction present in both society and their own lives.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
