Agnes, a professor, has arrived in Berlin to identify a dead girl who is believed to be her her runaway daughter Lydia. Much to her relief, the body isn't her daughters but another young woman who happened to have Lydia's identification card on her. With a glimmer of new-found hope, Agnes begins to frantically search the streets of Berlin for her daughter with little direction, consumed by her maternal instincts which have left her devoid of systematic thought. After a night of drinking away her despair, Agnes accidentally strikes Ines, a young homeless woman, with her car. There encounter is abrasive as first, but eventually it becomes something more, with Ines being a young woman who is far more willing to stay by Agnes' side. Maria Speth's Daughters is an intimate film about one mother's desperation to find the daughter she desperately loves. In a sense it's a film about maternity, showing the emotional effect a runaway daughter can have on a mother as Agnes finds herself trapped inside her own thoughts with nothing to consider but the worst about her daughter's fate. Much of the early film is directed in a very surgical way, with Maria Speth showing a nice ability to visually express Agnes' fears, grief, and desperation with carefully calculated compositions. The way the film is able to capture the mental isolation of Agnes is particularly compelling, using the combination of empty compositions and a remarkable lead performance by Corinna Kirchhoff that perfectly elicits this feeling of solitude a mother could have after her own daughter runs. Ines is an abrasive, free-spirited young woman whose lifestyle couldn't be any farther removed from Agnes, but as the two begin to form a relationship it becomes clear that Ines could be exactly what Agnes needs right now, being a young woman who views life it a much simpler, care-free way. Ines becomes almost this quasi-metaphysical representation of Agnes' own daughter, a young character who Agnes cares for but also a woman who uses her abrasive personality to push Agnes to reconsider her own motherly ways and how its shaped her relationship with her daughter. The two characters relationship begins to take on the mother-daughter dynamic itself, with their growing dependency becoming a dangerous thing due to the combination of Ines abrasive, almost antagonist personality and Anges weak desperation to fill the void left by her daughter. Daughters portrait of runaways is refreshing in that it understands that all runaways aren't necessarily related to abuse or other cliches, but simply the mindset of feeling trapped, oppressed, and needing to be set free and discover ones own independence. This is a very crucial concept in the characterizations of both Agnes and Ines, as the growing dependency between the two characters is what inevitably leads to confrontation between the two and eventual tragedy. While the film never fully develops into the perverse psychological study of dependency that it seemed to want to be towards the end, Maria Speth's Daughters is a nuanced study of one woman who has seen something she loved slip away, offering up enough fascinating ideals around dependency, grief, and maternity that make it worth seeing.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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