The title isn’t intended ironically in “The Best Mother in the World” — at least not to the extent it is in, say, “The Worst Person in the World.” But there’s a truism embedded in its hyperbole: Most people on good terms with their mother would describe her as the world’s greatest, regardless of any flaws and errors along the way. The two young children of Gal (Shirley Cruz), the endlessly put-upon protagonist of Brazilian writer-director Anna Muylaert‘s new film, believe as much, their devotion only strengthened as the script puts them collectively through the wringer. Conscientiously addressing a national crisis of domestic abuse while also lunging for the heartstrings, the film is an uneven balance of grainy social realism and crowd-pleasing uplift, but Cruz’s resolute performance just about holds it together.
Muylaert remains best known for her 2015 feature “The Second Mother,” a Sundance prizewinner that gained widespread distribution on the strength of its measured class commentary and open-hearted feeling. Like that film, “The Best Mother in the World” centers its gaze on a working-class woman struggling to do right by her children in a society and economy stacked against her, and it’s hard not to be moved by both the specificity of her plight and the wider picture the film paints of marginalized women’s rights in contemporary Brazil. It’s a less subtle, more sentimental film than its predecessor, with straightforward craft and writing that sometimes verges on the declamatory, but should be popular with audiences on the festival circuit following its Berlinale Special premiere.
It opens on perhaps its sharpest, most layered scene, as an addled, swollen-eyed Gal sits tensely in a police station, preparing to file a complaint against her boorish partner Leandro (Seu Jorge) after the latest of many violent physical altercations. Responding haltingly to the female caseworker’s questions, she reveals that he regularly beats her when she refuses his demands for sex, though she’s quick to make excuses for him: “Poor guy,” she says. “He loves me but there are days when I just can’t.” Shaking this self-blaming mindset will be a struggle for Gal throughout “The Best Mother in the World,” which is candid in depicting both Leandro’s monstrous behavior and her enduring, damaging love for him. She’s warned that filing the complaint will be an irreversible decision. A cut to black punctuates her hesitation.
She decides instead to make her own escape, hurriedly gathering her children Rihanna (Rihanna Barbosa) and Benin (Benin Ayo) while Leandro is in the shower, and hitting the streets of São Paulo with them in the pushcart with which she makes a meager living as a trash collector. Playing down the situation to the kids, she insists they’re on a grand adventure, camping on the sidewalks and practicing some urban foraging, though they aren’t quite convinced — least of all Rihanna, who knows more of the threat Leandro poses than she lets on to her mother.
In Muylaert’s episodic narrative, the city is alternately cruel and kind to the desperate and destitute. For every exploitative antagonist Gal encounters on her journey, there’s at least one understanding ally — notably Munda (Rejane Faria), a doughty, disabled squatter who encourages our heroine to “boss [her] own life.” If the character seems a bit of a convenient rhetorical mouthpiece for the film’s own message, she’s certainly a more empowering presence than Val (Luedji Luna), the cousin who lets the family crash in their home for a few days, but whose hospitality masks a retrograde position on Gal’s plight. “Wasn’t your dad always beating your mom? It’s normal, woman,” Val sighs, accusing her cousin of protesting too much.
“The Best Mother in the World” is most effective at showing how embedded such misogyny is in the collective cultural psychology, and how difficult that is to overcome. Gal keeps being pulled back into it herself, particularly over the course of a protracted, tonally unstable third act that volleys wildly between brutal peril and feelgood endorphins, toward a hopeful if slightly easy conclusion. If the film risks oversimplifying the challenges of breaking a cycle of violence, it reasonably stresses the possibility of change over solemn worst-case scenarios. There’s an unspoken history of repeated struggle and disappointment, meanwhile, in Cruz’s weathered physicality and burnt, wary vocal delivery: Where the film sometimes takes short cuts, the actor provides cracked, wounded subtext.
