MOTHER OF TEARS (2007)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*

I suppose, given the choice between a serial with no ending and a serial with a bad ending, I'll generally prefer the latter, just for the sense of closure.

I'm deliberately not looking up any filmographies of Dario Argento to explore what he was doing around 2007, or at biographical materials that might tell me why he decided to return to the "Mothers Trilogy" after executing the second installment INFERNO, a stunning twenty-seven years previous. The only question is whether he managed to do anything interesting with his concept of three evil witches who constantly foment horror and death, usually just for the sake of being evil. The most I can say for MOTHER OF TEARS is that it's simply mediocre, not aggressively bad like my current pick of The Worst Argento, the 1998 PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.

As in INFERNO, the viewpoint character is an American student in Rome. This time, said student is Sarah Mandy (Argento's daughter Asia), and her field is art restoration. While she and her museum-patron are examining artifacts from an archaeological dig, malevolent beings attack the duo, killing the other woman. A phantom voice speaks to Sarah and helps her escape, but when Sarah calls the cops they can find no trace of the attackers.

Argento's conjuring with artifacts makes little sense in the context of his series, since the Three Mothers aren't mummies to be released from people messing with their relics. The exposition in TEARS-- probably the most extensive seen in all three of the movies-- confirms what the earlier movies indicated: the Mothers are witches who have existed for centuries and who have carved out special niches from which they propagate evil, apparently for the sake of being evil. The first two witches perish in the respective movies devoted to them, and now there is only the legendary Mother of Tears, who maintains her cultus in Rome.

The only plot-thread generated by the museum-scene is the mysterious voice. The voice manifests once again when Sarah, diligently pursuing clues to the horror, is persecuted by both the police and the agents of the witches. (I must admit that Argento or his people made up the actors playing the witch-servants to make them look exceptionally creepy.) With the voice's help Sarah briefly makes herself invisible to detection, and so escapes her pursuers.

Another character provides the information that Sarah's late, never-known mother was a good witch, and the mother's spirit has been attempting to bring forth the daughter's own powers in order to give Sarah a fighting chance. This sounds like a promising deviation from the other two films, but Argento doesn't deliver on the promise. I don't necessarily think TEARS would have been a lot better had Sarah started doing Jedi-tricks, but at least that would have made some sort of sense. But at heart Argento can't get away from his giallo bag of tricks, and so Sarah merely runs from pillar to post, gathering info and just barely fending off her pursuers, including her former boyfriend, ensorcelled by the Mother's powers. Eventually one of her informants sends Sarah to the Mother's underground sanctum, but the way in which the heroine defeats the Mother and her aides is not only subcombative, it's terminally goofy and not in any way set up by all the earlier exposition.

Asia Argento has some decent performances to her name, but here she's stuck trying to evoke something akin to the Jessica Harper viewpoint character in SUSPIRIA, to whom the script makes direct reference, claiming that Sarah's witch-mother was somehow tied to the events of that narrative. The rest of the actors are similarly trammeled by roles that have little emotional resonance. But worst is that Argento, known in the seventies and eighties for his distinctive visual delirium, is entirely pedestrian here. MOTHER OF TEARS looks like a TV-movie as directed by a slumming Wes Craven. Its primary positive attributes are the experience of closure and the fact that Argento's PHANTOM makes TEARS look like a masterpiece.