‘Ma Ma‘ is the latest offering from screenplay writer and Director Julio Medem, and was showcased at a special screening for the Spanish Film Festival.
Penelope Cruz (‘Vicky, Cristina Barcelona‘, ‘Nine’) is simply sublime as Magda, a fiesty and fearless single mother who is diagnosed with breast cancer. She faces the painful journey ahead with stoic elegance, her only request to her delightful gynaecologist Julian (played by Asier Etxeandia) is that he saves her a nipple- just as a token she jokes. It is not easy viewing at times, lots of hospital rooms, unfair diagnoses and precious time cruelly cut short, but for a film that is saturated by the prognosis of inevitable death, Ma Ma is achingly full of life.
Magda decides that her cancer is not going to define her, nor erode her sense of self and femininity and she chooses to withhold the information from her son for the summer, whilst she comes to terms with the toll that chemotherapy will take on her. Yet just as life is at times stranger than fiction, the very same day she is diagnosed she meets beautiful soul Arturo (played by Luis Tosar). They bond over different facets of grief (the day they meet at her son’s football game, he finds out his wife and daughter have been in a car accident) and fall in love; becoming the companion that the other needs so desperately to survive.
Most of the frames are comprised of pale greys and blues, painting a melancholic state which is often at odds with the comedic dialogue and light-hearted nature of Magda’s coping mechanisms. In moments of a morphine-induced haze, she imagines a blonde haired orphan from Serbia – this little girl acts as a recurring metaphor in the film, but the audience has to wait a while before things become clear. Undoubtedly one of Cruz’s most intimate character portrayals, ‘Ma Ma’ is as arty as it is moving. It is not often such a beautiful box-office treasure is willing to be truly vulnerable in the physicality of a role; we see her naked, with no hair, no make-up, we see her cry and laugh but most of all, endure.
When all else seems lost, the film poses the question, what would you do if you had nothing left to lose? Well, having been jilted by an ex-husband and now with a companion who is too unable to make love to her, Magda decides to explore her sensuality with reckless abandon. The consequences of one particular evening at a secret sex club is possibly the most beautiful moment in the whole film. Because amidst all the horror of cancer, the film seems more affiliated with Magda’s journey of motherhood, her body, her desires and her victorious determination to create new beginnings, against all odds.
