Ma Ma

Every­thing that’s awful in the lat­est film by Julio Medem has noth­ing to do with its star and co-pro­duc­er, Penélope Cruz. She is absolved of respon­si­bil­i­ty, pure­ly for remind­ing us of her scin­til­lat­ing screen pres­ence. Embar­rass­ing, sec­ond-banana roles in big bud­get Eng­lish-lan­guage come­dies such as Grims­by and (par­don our French) Zoolan­der 2 required her to stand in a cat-suit and pout. They sig­nalled that she’d all but thrown in the tow­el when it came to ​“seri­ous” act­ing. But the first half of Ma Ma reminds us of the fiery star of Jamón, Jamón and Volver.

She plays the head­strong Mag­da, a sin­gle moth­er who, in the film’s open­ing scene, chuck­les defi­ant­ly when she is diag­nosed with breast can­cer. Though an urgent mas­tec­to­my is required, the prog­no­sis is pos­i­tive. She remains in high spir­its, jok­ing with her lovelorn doc­tor (Àlex Brendemühl), keep­ing the news from her foot­balling ace son, and find­ing a stur­dy lean­ing post in recent wid­ow­er, Arturo (Luis Tosar). Medem builds a plot around coin­ci­dence and bad for­tune which almost works because of the heavy styl­i­sa­tion in the shoot­ing and editing.

But where the first half of the film is dashed with trau­ma and tragedy, it nev­er descends into maudlin histri­on­ics, helped no end by Cruz’s con­fi­dent, dry­ly humor­ous and dole­ful­ly empa­thet­ic turn. Yet there seems to have been a com­plete change of tack at around the half way mark, as the sto­ry dive­bombs into the most nau­se­at­ing aria of artery-clag­ging sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty replete with CG beat­ing heart to keep extra tabs on Magda’s waver­ing health.

Cold rea­son turns to cock­eyed fan­ta­sy – it’s like you can see the film giv­ing up on life and stag­ger­ing to a cli­max so hor­ren­dous­ly mis­judged that you, too, will have to check your pulse to make sure that this is actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing. Seri­ous­ly, it’s like the final four of five shots of the film are at war with one anoth­er in the world corn­ball idio­cy cham­pi­onships. Yet, there’s enough here to sug­gest Medem has the eye and the nous for a big, impor­tant return after near­ly a decade in the wilderness.