My Mother Loves Women

MY MOTHER LOVES WOMEN


At the birthday party of their mother, the three beautiful Spanish daughters are in for the shock of their lives when they learn their mother has a new lover.

The daughters are named from their romantic father from characters in El Cid : Elvira, Sol and Gimena [the lead of In The City - another TIFF 2003 film]

Mother and father having recently split and divided their seemingly happy lives together - one filled with music and togetherness as evidenced by group photo of the mother and daughters by the piano when they were younger. To see their father figure being replaced in their lives by a woman is to say the least a non‑subtle shock.

The zany Leonora Watling plays the sensitive daughter Elvira who is filled with insecurities and selfdestructiveness who never lets anyone come close to her and allows herself to be underpaid and trampled by her boss at the book publishing company. To boot, she also has her own hidden novel in a drawer that has not seen the light of day by anyone else. [The ubiquitous Leonara Watling has appeared in Talk to Her and the recent My Life Without Me as the daft hairdresser.]

Furthermore as Elvira's loving father tells her she is more like her mother than she knows, which worries her considering her mother's present situation and further crazes her as she lets out in public. Apparently father knew of the mother's twosome but was less shocked about it than the daughters. All the older men in Leonora’s life - the father, the psychologist seem to rationalize away her mother's attraction to women. As her father explains it from the book of Sapphic: it is an untranslatable attraction between two women not forth sake of physicality but of the attraction of beauty. Sophia and Eliska literally play beautiful music together as they show the daughters during the birthday piano recital of the second movement of Schuman's Fantasia.

At her next session with her psychologist Elvira is on the couch after a sleepless night - the words "my mother is a lesbian" ringing through her head all night. The psychologist who is in love with his tank of angel fish compares her to the fish - and her cure is to be self-assertive and push her mother for a loan so she can be on her own and be the artist she wants to be. Paradoxical in its way: someone trying to be on her own yet relying on her mother for money. "Consider it a loan."

But it is the last straw when the daughter after finally working up the nerve to ask her mother for the money discovers there is none: all the millions have gone to Eliska for her student loan - even the proceeds of the sale of granddad's orchards.

My Mother Likes Women is a delightful film that in its own European way pushes the envelope that charms its way into the hearts. The attraction between the mother Sofia and her new friend Eliska has many insurmountable barriers: Sofia is Spanish and Eliska is from the Czech Republic, Sofia is many years older. The two play beautiful music together.

Sol - the youngest sister and the singer in a punkrock band debuts a song she just wrote while the whole family and Eliska is at attendance at a concert - it’s naughty and declaims "My mother likes a woman" -Understandably afterwards mother is not pleased nor are the daughters. They still push forward their scheme to find someone who will ply her ways on Eliska and discover the underside of nightlife - they venture into a lesbian bar for the first time and it is a beautiful world that defies the cliché seediness. The ladies are all beautiful. The three split up and look for a candidate. One who is dressed in man's clothing foists her charms upon the nervous Elvira at the bar and buys her a drink. But it is the young and sprightly Sol who finds that the women in the club are hitting on her so she volunteers to seduce Eliska.

But as they find out at a mother-lover-daughter outdoor sortie that it is Eliska and Elvira that have a mutual rapport - they both have a liking for poetry as Elvira quotes Emily Dickinson. They talk for hours.

Compounding the melodrama is the presence of an author who is being courted by her boss's publishing house that Eliska falls completely in mad with. Of course she sabotages the potential relationship while trying to figure out how to deal with Eliska.

Love hurts and love triumphs over all in the end in this daft and funny tale with its little messages.



The scheme to break up the two lovers goes through many flaws in the execution and the



Delightfully wacky and pushes the envelope