Review: Materna’s Bravura Filmmaking Is in Tedious Service of Capital-T Themes

The claustrophobia of the New York City subway is something of a leitmotif in David Gutnik’s Materna, an anthology of stories concerning four young women who feel weighed down by the pressures of modern life, particularly the expectations to honor and conform to notions of motherhood. In the opening scene, these pressures are physicalized by the subway that the women are riding alongside the harried Paul (Sturgill Simpson), who sees them only through the scrim of his own self-pity. But he’s just one of the many obstacles keeping these women from expressing and honoring themselves, and in prolonged flashbacks we learn how they came to be stuck with this symbol of white male entitlement.

Materna is also driven, as its title suggests, by capital-T themes. Every character has been fashioned so as to support an overarching treatise, giving the film a tiresome op-ed quality. Each of the four main characters is from a different class, and while two of them aren’t white, that’s an ultimately superficial differentiation, as they’re all defined in terms of their demons and misery—so that others may be indicted. Throughout, men are often unseen, as are, with two notable exceptions, the mothers whom Gutnik and co-screenwriters Assol Abdullina and Jade Eshete blame for their protagonists’ neuroses, which is to say that the filmmakers’ biases are inclusive. Beneath Materna’s identity politics are old-hat stereotypes that condescend to women more than celebrate them, reducing them to martyrs, though Gutnik’s bravura filmmaking at least marks him as someone to watch despite such tediousness.

Materna’s first and best act follows Jean (Kate Lyn Sheil), who’s designing what appears to be a sexual VR experience, and the scene in which she tests her technology is nearly worth the price of admission alone. Clad in a latex suit and headgear with eerily expressive eye slits, Jean essentially does a one-woman show of sexual positions, and what she sees in VR is left entirely to our imagination. Here, the filmmakers have crafted a true metaphor for female alienation in the modern age, in which technology, sexual expectations, privilege, and personal baggage mix into a relatable yet intangible stew of melancholia. It’s a truly original exploration of a character’s psyche, all the more notable for not trying to score cheap points against others.

The rest of this thread, though, anticipates what’s to follow from Materna. The remainder of Jean’s life is characterized as a drudge, represented by close-ups of her face in a depressed state as she goes about completing mundane tasks while her mother, via text, pesters her to get her eggs frozen. Jean gets pregnant, which, given that she appears to have no social life, may lead you to wonder if Materna is drifting into sci-fi terrain, positioning the VR machine as the father. But the filmmakers leave that possibility hanging, utilizing “ambiguity” as a crutch to drop the story—a pattern that will define several of Materna’s other threads.

The film’s second act concerns a black actress, Mona (Eshete), with a mother who’s also only heard from via text, and who wants Mona to quit acting and rejoin the Jehovah’s Witnesses. But the filmmakers have no interest in exploring the mother’s faith, or in the collision between religion and acting. The mother is simply an establishment figure, holding poor Mona back by preventing her from being able to connect to the latent rage that’s necessary to bringing a personal audition scene to life. This story does have one authentically startling scene, however, in which it appears that Mona’s acting coach, Wanda (Cassandra Freeman), has turned into Mona’s mother. This fissure between fiction and reality recalls those of Josephine Decker’s films, and the intimacy that Gutnik coaxes between his actors is remarkable.

The filmmakers mix things up a bit for the third thread by promoting one mother to center ring. Ruth (Lindsay Burge) is a stay-at-home mom who’s hysterical that her son, Jared (Jake Katzman), was punished for hectoring a gay student at school. The son’s actions are never disclosed—yet another strain for ambiguity that scans as timidity—as the thread instead pivots on Ruth encouraging her brother, Gabe (Rory Culkin), to talk to Jared. Everyone is conservative except Gabe, a long-haired, unemployed liberal who claims to be making a documentary about police brutality. This laughable stereotype isn’t even the least subtle characterization in the narrative, as Ruth’s husband, David (Michael Chernus), is an almost literal fat cat who’s first seen reading Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, so that he may “blame the woman”—that is, Asia Argento—for the man’s suicide. This mess of Easter eggs might’ve worked if it were played for dark comedy, but the film collapses under the weight of its pretensions.

Materna rebounds a bit in the fourth story, which is about yet another young woman and yet another overbearing mother. Perizad (Abdullina) returns from New York City to her home country of Kyrgyzstan to sort out the mysterious death of her uncle, uncovering considerable familial skeletons. After the shrill freneticism of the previous story, the tone here is refreshingly austere and foreboding. And Perizad’s mother and grandmother, played respectively by Zhamilya Sydykbaeva and Jamal Seidakmatova in the film’s best performances, add texture and pathos to Materna, finally alleviating its obsessive self-pity. The filmmakers finally show people mutually affecting one another in cycles of pain and control, rather than blaming phantom figures. For once, they bother to suggest the notion of self-accountability.