From "Perfect Mother" to Women's Oedipus Complex (Wurei)

I recently watched the French mini-series "Une mère parfaite" on Netflix. The drama is adapted from the American novel of the same name. The plot is about a mother Helen who left Paris after her relationship with her mother broke down more than 20 years ago. He went to Germany to live and married the doctor Matthias Berg, and established a middle-class family in Berlin.

Helen has a daughter and a son, and her husband has a respectable job. She has also been trying to be a perfect wife and mother. Her adult daughter Anya is studying at university in Paris, and her son Lucas is still studying in high school in Berlin. , from the first episode when their daughter had an accident in Paris, Helen decided to deal with it alone and asked her husband to stay in Berlin to "take care of" their son who was about to take the high school graduation exam. It can be seen that these parents attach great importance to their children's academic studies.

In fact, I felt that this drama had no novelty, the characters were not particularly profound, and its narrative made me feel that there was no need to adapt it to a story that took place in Europe. The plot is about a middle-class family that is gradually falling apart due to the murder case that their daughter was involved in in Paris. The mother finds her old lover, lawyer Vincent, to defend her daughter. However, her daughter Anya revised her testimony many times. As the timely revelations gradually unfold, Mother also began to doubt Anya.

touches on old-school race and class issues

Perhaps it is to prove the saying "there is nothing new under the sun". When talking about social issues, we always start with "race" and "class", but every time I see the relevant plot, I feel "boring". In other words, I think a similar plot would have been discussed in more depth if it were a Taiwanese script. After all, there are not so many issues to deal with.

This album gives me the feeling that the screenwriter wants to touch on some "issues" here and there, such as race, class, family issues, gender bias... so every item is very careless, maybe due to the limited space?

Daughter Anya is accused of killing Damian, a handsome second-generation classmate from the same school. Damian himself also has a bad past, which is also something his mother wants to cover up... Perhaps what the screenwriter wants to discuss here is "innocent" Victim?". Exceptionally, Anya, who studied law, worked in a women's abuse shelter in order to put her knowledge to use, providing legal information to these women. However, she also had many flaws.

The mother's struggle lies in her rational desire to find out the truth of the matter. At first she believed that the truth could help her daughter clear her name, but as the investigation deepened, various problems were gradually discovered: Anya's motives for lying and the circumstances that led to Damian's death. What is the real situation, what is Damian's mother worried about? Where does Anya live? what is she doing?

The truth about the perfect mother

Everyone in the show has their own secrets, from Anya herself to her brother Lucas, and Helen's perfect life, including her ideas about marriage and motherhood, are called into question.

Her mother, Helen, immigrated to Germany 25 years ago and broke up with her old lover without saying goodbye. This was because her parents had a long-term disagreement and her mother hid her father's death, causing Helen to miss her father's farewell ceremony. That's when she decided to leave Paris and break away from her mother. She has been trying hard to be different from her mother despite her control over her mother's negative emotions.

But what does the perfect mother look like? When Helen went to Paris to deal with her daughter's affairs, she discovered that her daughter often met with her grandmother. Her daughter blamed her for not being willing to communicate with her family and only wanted to maintain a perfect image on the surface, so she ignored many details.

As the plot develops, Helen will also rekindle her relationship with her old lover (I think her husband is very pitiful and just a tool), but the moral bottom line she ultimately challenges is even lower, so I won’t say more in order not to explode (although No one cares~).

I still want to talk about the conflicting plot design. There are following reasons why French films, including "Lupin", always have endless racial issues:

Social reflection: Photo albums usually reflect social reality, and France faces a society with multicultural and multiracial backgrounds, and racial issues are an important social issue in real life.

Social Inequality: Racial issues are often related to social inequality and discrimination. Some French film series may try to explore these issues, trigger audiences to think about social injustice, and promote social discussion and improvement of these issues.

International influence: French film and television works are internationally influential, and the film and television industry ranks second in exports. The series attempts to resonate with international audiences by discussing racial issues. This is also a problem that I think Netflix series has always had. In order to cater to international audiences But it lacks the locality of the album.

Female Oedipus Complex

It just so happened that Ferrante wrote in "Fragments" that one of her novels was about women's Oedipus complex, and she herself had similar emotions. She had been afraid since she was a child that her mother would meet other men when she went out, or worry about The way other men looked at her mother.

I have somewhat forgotten her original words, but the meaning is that she believes that her mother belongs to her father, and she may look at her mother from her father’s perspective. She also mentioned that “whether women experience first, second, or third marriage, same-sex or opposite-sex "Marriage is a repetition of the mother's experience, and the mother's image cannot be eliminated from life." However, women often want to prove that they are different from their mothers. Helen strives to be the "perfect mother" because she does not identify with her mother, and her daughter thinks She had "nothing to do with herself" about what was happening in society. She took an extreme leave of absence from school to work in a welfare institution, and also dated illegal immigrants.

postscript:

Last month, I accepted the invitation from the Key Comment Network and started writing review articles. I have published 9 articles so far. I cannot reveal the full text of these articles for which I have received royalties. Also, because of my cooperation with writing articles and work, I have less time to write articles recently.