On Tuesday night at the Venice Film Festival, Darren Aronofsky premieres his new thriller “mother.”
The film’s press screenings earlier in the morning were met with loud boos.
The horror film stars Jennifer Lawrence as a young housewife who puts aside her need to renovate a home for her husband (Javier Bardem), a poet suffering from a writer’s block.
When mysterious strangers (Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer) stop by and make themselves at home, Lawrence’s character is uneasy, but she relents to her husband, who thinks the intrusion may help with his writer’s block. She becomes pregnant and continues to turn over any ounce of common sense to satisfy her husband, until her entire world inevitably falls out right from under her.
For Aronofsky, making Lawrence’s character submissive was intentional. “It really has to do with the allegory of the film and what we’re trying to do there,” he said, revealing later that the film is one of many in competition this year dealing with the topic of climate change and the future of the planet.
Referring to the day in the Genesis creation story when God made man, he also said, “If you think about Day 6 in your history and in your bibles, you’ll kind of figure out where the film starts.”
“Most of my films take many, many years to come to life. Black Swan was 10 years. Noah was 20 years. And this film happened in five days,” he further explained of writing the script. “It was the strangest thing. It came out of living on this planet and sort of seeing what’s happening around us and not being able to do anything. I just had a lot of rage and anger and I just wanted to channel it into one emotion, one feeling.”
Aronofsky said: “I think the planet is being undone by humanity. I don’t blame one gender over the other gender. I think it is about how people are insatiable, how there’s this endless consumption.”
The director cited Susan Griffin’s 1978 book Women and Nature as a major influence on the film: Lawrence’s character represents Mother Earth, and her destruction symbolizes how people treat the environment.
“I think there is absolutely a connection of how women and the environment are treated.”
For the director, “America is schizophrenic. We go from backing the Paris climate accord to eight months later pulling out. It’s tragic, but in many ways, we’ve revealed who the enemy is and now we can go attack it.”
