"The Mother"

The script here is by Hanif Kureishi, and Michell navigates its subtleties with ease. (Michell may be best known in the States for "Notting Hill" and "Changing Lanes," but he has adapted Kureishi before, as the director of the BBC miniseries "The Buddha of Suburbia.") It's simple and convenient to seize upon "The Mother" as a story of sexual awakening, and it's partly that: At one point May, whose body has the soft, doughy contours of, well, a mother, tells Darren that until she met him, she'd been certain she'd go to her deathbed never having been touched again. Reid is stunning here: Early in the movie, we see her in stretch pants and zip-up jackets, her hair combed neatly but hastily. But once Darren enters the picture, she switches to scarves and floaty skirts worn with flat sandals -- she looks right for her age and yet infinitely more free. Her hairstyle has barely changed, but now it's a soft pageboy, the sort of hair you want to touch. Those cosmetic transformations aside, Reid herself looks more vital. And you realize that she never exactly looked old -- it was simply that her carriage, her demeanor, the set of her mouth spoke only of loneliness, defeat and exhaustion, if not submerged anger.

The sex scenes in "The Mother" are handled delicately, but Michell doesn't dilute their erotic charge. There's no other way to put it: Reid's body, which we see semi-nude, is real. But it's a testament to the acting and the filmmaking that we get used to Reid's soft, milky-pale contours immediately -- they don't seem at all out of place next to Craig's youthfully buff, bronzy muscles. She's defined by her family (and by us) as "a mother," but in bed with Darren, she is only herself.

Still, I think it's an underestimation of "The Mother" to fixate mostly on the sex. Kureishi, as both a novelist and a screenwriter, has a gift for layering subtleties as if they were transparent, shimmering, multicolored veils; he knows any situation can change in an instant, depending on the light around it. What's most striking about May and Darren is the way they connect out of bed: They're soul mates who just happen to have dropped onto the planet at different times, and they speak so easily and so candidly with one another, from the very beginning, that it's not at all shocking when they end up in bed together. Craig (who played Ted Hughes in Christine Jeffs' flawed but interesting "Sylvia") is a relaxed but nonetheless sharply attuned actor: He shows us everything that's astonishing about Darren's intuitive, sensitive nature, even as he hints at his flaws. We see how he's perfect for May even though, of course, he's all wrong. The needy, neurotic Paula, on the other hand, is the worst possible companion for Darren. And even before she learns about May and Darren's secret relationship, her poisonous resentment of her mother has seeped to the surface.

The suggestion, I think, is that while young people are supposed to be the ones who are open and free, the openness that we associate with youth actually has nothing to do with age. At one point we see May on her knees, cleaning the floor of Paula's not-so-tidy apartment, singing "Space Oddity" in a soft, clear voice -- it's just a song she's picked up somewhere, but she has adopted it as her own, regardless of whether it fits her generational profile. By the end of "The Mother," May has finally admitted she's something of a space oddity herself, and the knowledge is freeing. Her children's view of her, or even Darren's view of her, can't define or restrict her. She knows, now, that it's time to leave the capsule if she dares.

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