Ma Mère (2004) review

Being a Bataille enthusiast, I really looked forward to seeing this, but after a half-hour in I realized that maybe Bataille isn't a writer whose work best translates to the screen. Dirty mother (Isabelle Huppert, back in tissue sniffing mode) takes it upon herself to instruct her blank son (Louis Garrel, thankful to his father for a career) in the ways of the world by arranging for girls to 'educate' him, but the film turns into fraudulent Eurosmut, with obnoxious over-the-top sexuality that takes the fun out of sex and turns it into something grim and insufferable (at the very least, Louis Malle's delightful Murmur of the Heart defused its inherently shocking theme with a sense of humor and a touch of romance). Having read a lot of Bataille (The Story of the Eye is a favorite), I do understand that his works sometimes read like grotesque dime-store trash, and that's how this incestuous number turns out: the sexual ambiguity and hokey spiritual pronouncements might have been less humorous in print, but seeing it acted out is ridiculous. Who knew a story about popping one's cherry could instill such a sense of viewer malaise?