Ma Ma
Julio Medem (2015)
Magda learns from a gynaecologist that she has breast cancer. She goes straight from receiving the news to watch her son Dani play in a school soccer game. There she meets Arturo, who coaches the junior team at Real Madrid and is a talent scout for the club. Just as he’s told Magda what an exciting potential talent Dani is, Arturo’s phone rings. At the end of a short conversation, he gets up from where he and Magda are sitting. He stumbles and falls down a couple of concrete steps and collapses weeping. Arturo’s wife has been gravely injured and the couple’s only child, a daughter, killed in a car accident. Magda accompanies Arturo to the hospital where his wife lies in a coma. This is the traumatic start of Ma Ma, written as well as directed by Julio Medem, produced by and starring Penélope Cruz.
The afternoon on which these events take place is the last of the school year. When she first talks with the gynaecologist, Julián (Asier Etxeandia), Magda explains that she’ll be unemployed from the start of the next school year, having just lost her teaching job as a result of the Spanish economic crisis. The recession isn’t mentioned again in Ma Ma, however, and is far from the only element of the story to be quickly abandoned. Magda, although she’s starting chemotherapy, makes repeated visits to the (different) hospital where Arturo (Luis Tosar) keeps vigil. His wife hangs on in a coma for a few days but, for as long as she survives, she’s frankly a hindrance to Julio Medem: once she dies, Arturo can focus on his main plot function of making Magda’s life happy. Within a very few weeks, she has completed chemo; Julián has performed a successful mastectomy on her; and she, Arturo and Dani (Teo Planell) head off for an idyllic coastal holiday together. Although Arturo and Dani continue to share an interest in football, the significance of Arturo’s job soon fades out too: it was just a way of, as it were, kicking things off between him and Magda. (The first part of the story takes place in the summer of 2012 and includes footage of Spain’s 4-0 trouncing of Italy in the Euro final. By ironic coincidence, I saw Ma Ma the day after Italy had put Spain out of this year’s Euros.)
While his wife is in hospital, we see other members of Arturo’s family visiting and comforting him. They then disappear instantly from the scene, surplus to requirements. On the day after her diagnosis, Magda sees Dani off on a summer holiday with his aunt and cousins but they never feature in the story. Her mother died of breast cancer when Magda was a small child and there’s no evidence that the heroine has any friends (the same goes for Dani and Arturo). She’s increasingly separated from Dani’s father, a philosophy lecturer called Raúl, who’s in a relationship with one of his students. This artificial isolation might be justified if Medem and Penélope Cruz were intent on dramatising the ‘aloneness’ of a woman in Magda’s situation but Ma Ma isn’t interested in any such thing. Long before she and Arturo go to the seaside, the film has hurtled into conventional terminal-illness-tragic-love-story territory.
This underpopulated movie is, to an exceptional degree, part of the long tradition of cosmetic euphemising of cancer on screen. For one thing – and on a relatively trivial level – everyone in sight is good looking: not only Magda, Arturo, Dani and Julián but also the beautiful, sympathetic nurse who supervises the chemo sessions (Silvia Abascal) and even the contemptible Raúl (Àlex Brendemühl). (We don’t see the girl Raúl’s having an affair with or the girl he switches to later on but we’re told emphatically that they’re lookers too.) The movie’s coffee-table take on cancer is most salient and offensive in its presentation of Magda herself. When her hair falls out during chemo, she looks in the mirror and says what a sight she is – but the shaven head accentuates the beauty of Penélope Cruz’s eyes and her pallor is skin deep, a make-up job. Magda’s cancer returns, metastasises and is incurable: she’s given only six months to live but, when she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant by Arturo, she resolves to survive long enough to give birth. Julián is amazed by her mind-over-matter determination: ‘You look great,’ he tells the patient as she passes beyond the six-month mark, and so she does. There have been no symptoms prior to her second cancer diagnosis. There’s barely a hint of pain or discomfort from either cancer or pregnancy, let alone a suggestion of the challenges of coping with both simultaneously. Part of the viewer is grateful for Medem’s evasion of reality – it lets you off easily. The other part is angered by it. The evasion is much worse in a modern fatal illness movie than it was in old-time Hollywood progenitors: the x-rays and ultrasound images and so on – included because they make for good shots – keep us aware of medical actuality, thereby make us more aware of what’s not being shown.
The film’s several dream sequences are deplorably literal-minded. On the beach, Magda twice imagines that she sees crabs advancing from the sea – crabs, that is, as in Cancer the crab. On the second occasion, the creatures are tossed back whence they came by a young girl who is a central and recurrent presence in Ma Ma. This pale, thin child – a girl in winter – features first in a mysterious prologue, then as a photograph on the gynaecologist’s desk. Julián explains to Magda that the girl’s name is Natasha; that she currently lives in a Siberian orphanage; that he and his wife, who’ve tried unsuccessfully for a child of their own, plan to adopt Natasha. But a doubtful look immediately crosses Julián’s noble face to signal his mixed feelings about the plan. In the event, the adoption doesn’t happen and the marriage breaks up. It might seem surprising, in view of his misgivings, that Julián displays Natasha’s photograph in his office but it means the girl can come in handy to Julio Medem later on, as Magda’s visualisation of the daughter to whom she will give birth but never see grow up.
Even by the standards of screen medics whose relationships with patient protagonists take a surprising turn, Julián is quite something. He’s nothing if not proactive. He phones Magda to wish her happy new year and suggest she come in for a check-up (she appears never to have returned to the hospital during the several months since her breast was removed). In other words, he phones to get the tragic narrative going again. During her pregnancy, Julián not only visits her at home but, when Magda, Arturo and Dani make a one-year-on return trip to the coast resort, turns up on the beach in swimwear. He proceeds to examine the heavily pregnant Magda in the sea. Why not? It makes for more pretty pictures. Julián also sings. Magda hears him humming quietly to himself in the hospital, learns from the nurse that he has a good voice and asks to hear more: Julián responds not with any diffidence but as a practised performer. He sings again immediately before the mastectomy operation and – his big number – on stage at the bar where he and the family go to relax after the doctor’s marine examination of Magda.
While his characterisation of Julián is extravagantly silly, Medem’s writing of the roles of Dani and Arturo is indifferent and slipshod. Dani, old enough to be on the verge of a place in the Real Madrid youth team, nevertheless needs to ask his mother, when she’s expecting, where babies come from. It’s less incredible that the boy hasn’t thought about death until Magda’s is imminent but striking nonetheless that Dani swallows wholesale Arturo’s Catholic beliefs: Magda, from what she says, is agnostic; Dani’s father is an academic philosopher (and his behaviour isn’t what you’d call Christian). Is the idea that, because he knows a lot about football, Arturo is regarded by Dani as omniscient? Julio Medem probably hasn’t worked this out – Arturo’s religion is, again, just something useful. We seem meant to assume that his faith allows him to get over his first two bereavements in double quick time. Certainly, no one ever asks Arturo how he’s feeling or coping with the death of his wife and daughter in such shocking circumstances. When Magda confides to Julián that she and Arturo are very happy together except that ‘he can’t get it up’, there’s no suggestion that this might have anything to do with the persisting memory of his wife. It can only be the result of Magda’s having had a breast removed – the result, that is, of something Magda is troubled by. And once the problem is raised, it’s solved: shortly after this conversation, Arturo does get it up and Magda is pregnant. She’ll give him a new daughter – that’ll make up for the one he lost last year.
Penélope Cruz is a star and a good actress and she carries the film effortlessly. Luis Tosar isn’t a star (outside Spain anyway) but he’s a wonderful actor and a powerful screen presence. He makes Arturo’s breakdowns in the early stages genuinely upsetting: the problem is, Tosar’s truthfulness throws into relief the phoniness of all that follows. Teo Planell is natural and likeable as Dani. Asier Etxeandia plays Julián nicely until the character becomes ridiculous beyond recall. (Etxeandia does have a very pleasant voice, even if, as noted above, he’s been directed to sing in too extrovert a way.) Alberto Iglesias supplies a typically sensitive and melodic score. But Ma Ma is such a stupidly vain and tasteless movie that the talents of all these people count for little. In the final scene, Dani is rocking his new baby sister. Arturo comes to sit beside them. We hear footsteps – can it be that Magda is still going strong? No: the footsteps turn out to be Julián’s. It’s not clear if he’s moved in or is paying another of his unexpected visits but he sits down as if part of the happy family group: three men and a baby. Arturo and Dani join Julián in a reprise of the number he dedicated to Magda in the bar at the beach resort.
28 June 2016