Mar Coll’s third feature, SALVE MARIA, lies behind a title thick with implications. For the third time, Coll’s lens is unflinchingly fixed on a woman tethered by stifling family bonds. Maria (Laura Weissmahr), author turned mother, wrestles a post-partum depression that couples with a fetishistic obsession with Alice (Magali Heu), a mother who has drowned her twins.
The decision to shift the title from its source material (Mother’s Don’t by novelist Katixa Agirre) suggests a film with nails firmly dug into contemporary Spanish Catholicism. Specifically, the long-held ‘sacred vocation’ of motherhood. Barcelona and its religious inheritance flicker through the windows of hospital waiting rooms and a cramped apartment, but rarely intrude into the domestic narrative. In fact, Catholic scrupulosity is only sparingly resurrected after the film’s title card. Once, via Sylvia Plath’s gutting poem on the dreaded ‘fourth trimester,’ Nick and the Candlestick, and again, as Maria tracks down Alice. In a Romanesque church, far away from her husband and child, Maria stares into two of the fourteen eyes of the apocalyptic beast (painted in mural). Church bells toll; her breast lactates. Maria’s stone stillness, while she dare not blink at the beast, recalls the Catholic phenomenon of weeping Madonna statues.
“The material hinted at by the premise of SALVE MARIA may promise to apply religious scepticism to the timely issues of postpartum care [but the film refrains] from centring [the oppressive presence of religious ideals].”
The slow secularisation of historically Catholic regions, the lingering cultural stigmas, and the religious ideals of motherhood seem to coalesce naturally into a project that Coll could excel in. Coll’s directorial catalogue, replete with female collaborators, has flirted with contemporary Catholic sensibilities and their effects on women. THREE DAYS WITH THE FAMILY, her feature debut from 2009, tackles the rejection of the female kin of a Catalonian middle-class family as they observe mourning rites for their lost patriarch. The film is a portrait of a family reuniting to participate in the central processes of the Catholic faith – wake, mass and burial. The material hinted at by the premise of SALVE MARIA may promise to apply religious scepticism to the timely issues of postpartum care: in Spain, mothers currently have no legal entitlement to screenings for postpartum depression. However, as in THREE DAYS, Coll and co-writer Valentino Viso imply the oppressive presence of religious ideals but refrain from centring them. Instead, the dread in Coll’s newest feature owes less to religion than it does to literature.
“We do not expect to end the film in a frolic of utopic motherhood. Instead, we simply hope [Maria] asks for help.”
Maria is a mother who is also a writer. She is determined to retain this facet of her identity amid her new responsibilities. Maria chronicles her shame in writings she keeps secret. Upsettingly for any viewer, these involve fantasies of violence towards her newborn, Eric. Alice is her source of twisted narrative inspiration. Weissmahr’s performance skilfully guides us away from unrealistic expectations of salvation. Her controlled torment informs us that SALVE MARIA isn’t intent on ‘fixing’ Maria. We do not expect to end the film in a frolic of utopic motherhood. Instead, we simply hope she asks for help.
Plath is not the only writer invoked. Glowing red intertitles punctuate Maria’s story, each bearing a literary epigraph: Adrienne Rich, Euripides’ Medea, Simone de Beauvoir. Such potent literary referencing requires caution. Medea is a name so culturally dense – parcelled for centuries with connotations of maternal vengeance and infanticide – that it risks becoming the film’s gravitational centre. Zeltia Montes’ score of female vocalisations, whether intended by Montes or not, lands as a Greek chorus from a mournful tragedy. The heavy invocation of Medea bends interpretation towards itself, almost forcing a viewing of Maria’s journey determined by this mythic frame.
SALVE MARIA is a rebellion against the sociological monomyth of the ‘immaculate mother’ and a rebellion against a literary inheritance that makes monsters out of the mother disturbed. Often shifting into analysis over thriller, SALVE MARIA inhabits maternal despair without monstering its mother. The film is a captivating story which also renders visible those who are so frequently mythically distorted: women in crisis.