By Ben Hooper.
‘As she often says “Girls are more interesting.”’
Swiss/French director Stéphanie Argerich paints an intimate family portrait as she explores her relationship with her mother, classical music superstar Martha Argerich. What follows is a fascinating, if self-indulgent, character study of prodigious musical talent and maternal legacy.
Like many mother-daughter relationships, the Argerichs’ is a complex, and often fractured one. The director describes her mother’s parenting style as ‘like a cat playing with a mouse,’ and relates that she was once so attention-starved as a child that she jealously bit one of her mother’s fans as they waited for an autograph. While it’s a captivatingly intimate device to have a daughter put her own family under the microscope, it often feels like the film is too coloured by the younger Argerich’s personal sentiments to provide a balanced documentary.
However, the familiarity between filmmaker and subject does allow for more personal interviews, which have been edited together with concert footage, archive television appearances and the home movies that Stéphanie Argerich has been making since childhood. Far from being cobbled together, the clips are edited eloquently, to poignant, and sometimes acerbic, effect.
Martha Argerich makes for an interesting subject; her vague but mesmerising musings on music, love and life drifting around her like the smoke from her skinny cigarettes. Stéphanie’s two sisters are also charming and articulate interviewees, and add an element of unassuming warmth.
While the film works as a fascinating character study, and a well-constructed one at that, there’s no real journey for the audience to go on. It suffers from a lack of purpose, and there’s a nagging sensation of the film simply being another cry for attention from a grown-up child disillusioned by a transient family lifestyle. But while Argerich (Bloody Daughter) might just be too personal to strike a chord with a wider audience, the quest for reconciliation is a universal one. Just like its enigmatic subject, the film ‘says things without saying them.’
Out on DVD 1st June.
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