Review: Mama Weed Pleasantly Coasts on Isabelle Huppert’s Star Power

Jean-Paul Salomé’s Mama Weed is a crime caper that coasts on the charisma of its star. Seemingly unruffled by time, Isabelle Huppert consistently plays the sort of chic, steely, stylish roles that are normally reserved for younger actors. In this sense, she suggests France’s answer to Susan Sarandon, with whom she shares a propensity for sensual mischief.

That mischief is on pronounced display in Mama Weed, which is designed so that Huppert may “win” every scene, in the process walking away with the film and imbuing it with her audience-wish-fulfilling elegance. Such a construction is satisfying though lightweight, as there never feels as if there’s much at stake. Crime films, even crime comedies, usually thrive on a sense of danger, while Huppert’s character here is clearly invulnerable from the start.

Huppert plays Patience, who works for a police department translating the Arabic spoken by drug dealers under surveillance. Wearing headphones, typing away at a screen, breathlessly rattling out a crime plot as it unspools, Patience brings to mind an author at work, an association that subtly underscores the element of the frustrated artist that she seeks to suppress. Early on, we learn that Patience comes from a family of criminals, one of whom was also an immigrant, and so her life on the side of the law is offered up by the filmmakers as a kind of settling—for stability at the expense of adventure, risk, and real money.

Such a notion could be unforgivably sentimental, but Salomé complements it with a textured view of the French criminal world as a network of outsiders, ignored by the law in every fashion except punitive, who embrace a common-sense means of survival. When Patience inevitably crosses over the line of the law, she discovers the alternate identities of people at the peripheries of her orbit, people she barely bothered to notice before her transition.

Like many of her neighbors, Patience has her own problems. Patience’s mother (Liliane Rovère) resides in a nursing home that her daughter can’t afford, while she herself lives in a stylish yet snug apartment presided over by a Chinese landlord, Colette (a scene-stealing Nadja Nguyen), who reminds her that she’s the last white person in the building. Meanwhile, Patience is dating the chief of police, Phillipe (Hippolyte Girardot), a nice, reliable, and quite dull fellow who represents the ultimate refutation of her crime-family liveliness.

Of course, Phillipe will become Patience’s antagonist, and without his knowledge, once she begins dealing weed to the Arabic drug dealers that she’s tailing at work, a situation that will prompt her to choose between enlivening chaos and enervating routine. This is a promising setup, complete with a variety of supporting characters who affirm the racial, political prejudices that plague France as well as many other countries.

Yet Mama Weed ultimately feels like nothing but setup. Patience develops a fraught routine with her dealers, providing them intel she gleans from the police, but the push and pull between enforcers and outlaws is given short shrift by Salomé, who isn’t interested in generating suspense or in truly exploring Patience’s personality under duress. Patience’s control over the situation never appears to be truly imperiled, not even by the crime lords who seek to reclaim their stolen weed (think of the volatility of Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, another female-empowering crime-comic odyssey).

Rather, Mama Weed is a fantasy that validates Patience’s eventual willingness to live out loud, grooving on her and by extension Huppert’s effortlessness in a fashion that borders on smugness. This pleasant yet forgettable film is intended to wash over you, leaving good vibes in its wake, which it does, though it’s a pity that Salomé didn’t challenge Huppert. Or us.