Ma Mère

Dir. Christophe Honoré
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Louis Garrel, and Joana Preiss
110 min. 

In this 2004 adaptation of Georges Bataille’s novel Ma Mère (1966), Isabelle Huppert plays the eponymous mother who seduces her son into a world of orgies and unrestricted sex, before attempting to seduce him.

Hélène, a self-described slut who enters the life of her pious seventeen-year-old son, seeks to expose him to her world of anonymous and abundant sexual deviancy. Hélène briefly disappears, as the son abandons his Catholic naiveté and accepts a life of the flesh. Freely adapting Bataille’s posthumously published work, Honoré’s divisive film stays true to the author’s interest in sexual transgression and what it reveals about the nature of society.