In an unmissable film, a son faces up to his Jewish mother’s mental illness

By Dan Friedman
January 27, 2025

Julien Carpentier’s intimate portrait of a man and his bipolar mother is structured around flowers. They are everywhere — from the opening scene where Pierre (William Legbhil) and Ibou (Salif Cissé) buy the day’s flowers from a market to the film’s closing shot of a bouquet brought to celebrate the gathering of a small, bruised, North African Jewish family. It’s not just a fanciful choice of imagery, either: We find out the prices of stems and where they are grown, we learn that oleander is poisonous, that peonies must be planted far apart, and — sweetly — that carnations symbolize the love of a mother for her son.

In some circumstances, using such a ubiquitous symbol might be a lazy move but not here. Pierre owns a flower shop, fueled with knowledge and love of the subject that he has inherited from his mother Judith (Agnes Jaoui). Flowers are central to their lives and livelihood, flowers are what they both know and what they can share with one another even when they are stuck behind their daily feelings or mental illness.

Similarly, taking a mother-son relationship and reversing it so that the son has to take care of — indeed, be in legal trusteeship of — his mother, could be trite. But, though this is Carpentier’s first feature, he is especially committed to this fictionalized version of his own relationship with his mother. His varied movie shorts and TV experience along with his deep engagement with the subject matter give him the means and motivation to keep the relationship — and, as a result, the film — beautifully poised.

The events that give the movie its title begin a few minutes into the action when Pierre gets a phone call from his grandmother to tell him his mother is at her apartment. We do not yet understand the gravity of the news, but we see from Pierre’s reaction that this is, indeed, an emergency. He has to sideline his customers, his love interest, and a major client, to deal with Judith who has escaped from the clinic where she lives. While she is out, his life is hers.

People who live with bipolar family members will recognize how Pierre’s mood changes. There is no air in the room for anyone else, Pierre has to focus his attention on Judith at all moments and with a warranted level of suspicion. What is in her water bottle? How does he know she will be outside the store when he comes out? He has to put out metaphorical blazes before Judith has metaphorically set them. Indeed, in a more brutal film, his preemptive actions themselves could cause trouble, dousing flames that are not there and angering others with the water he sprays.

Mercifully, though, Carpentier does not dive into the stories that might have arisen from Pierre’s justifiable paranoia. It’s easy to think that the institution looking after his mother would take punitive steps after he falsely calls out their ambulance as he does in one scene. Likewise, the movie could have taken a dramatic turn if he had suffered in some way after falsely accusing an innocent Black teen who had helped Judith with her shopping, of taking her credit card.

Whether she wanders off, runs off, or plays the good girl, Judith’s euphoria is as dangerous as it is exciting. Her manic charisma is intoxicating and takes Pierre out of his daily, mundane life. The saying goes that you need to break eggs to make an omelette, but breaking eggs isn’t sufficient for omelettes to be made nor do you need to break glassware to make couscous. And, from the moment that his mother arrives back in his life, Pierre is walking on eggshells. Carpentier, further dramatizes this metaphor by having them actually smash wine glasses on the kitchen floor. She does so in anger and he does so as a way of snapping her out of the hysteria: “Mazel tov” he comments with every crash.

Mental illness is so perplexing because it removes the lines of accountability. We hear what Judith’s disease has cost Pierre and we also hear him say — and mean — that he knows she cannot help it. Every action she takes leaves them both teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Every song is a verse away from a scream, every dance a step away from the ambulance. But, as the friendly bar man says, she’s a good person and that’s the main thing.

Judith is sexy, damaged, loving, self-aware, and utterly forgetful in turn. She is a charming, mentally ill 60-something woman in the Bordeaux region who the camera loves and for whom the audience fears. The care that Pierre provides in the film echoes the care that Carpentier provides in shaping the film around her: the dialogue and characterization, the scenes and settings, the songs and sounds. Carpentier does a beautiful job of setting up scenes that can be, like flowers, aesthetically arranged or chaotically jumbled.

I went to see This Is My Mother (“La vie de ma mère”) based on little more than trust in the NYJFF curators who had brought it to North America and a fascination with the work of French (Tunisian, Jewish) actress Jaoui. I was not disappointed: Jaoui is the heart of the film, making a watchable film unmissable.

Most famous for her multiple award-winning directorial debut A Taste of Others (2000), she is an accomplished actress, screenwriter and director for both film and theater. What I didn’t know is that Jaoui’s own mother was a respected psychotherapist and author; whether that has any impact on Jaoui’s performance, I cannot say, but she is utterly convincing in her role.

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