A parenting/parentage problem brought to life in Anna Muylaert's smart DON'T CALL ME SON

The last time we heard from Anna Muylaert was just last year with her Oscar-submitted for Best Foreign Language Film, The Second Mother, a wonderfully complicated movie in which ironies abound and everything from class and economics to pride and parenting are involved. Ms Muylaert's latest endeavor, DON'T CALL ME SON (Mãe Só Há Uma), is a lot less complicated, while sporting a half-hour shorter running time, too. This does not mean that the movie is any less rich or deep, however. In fact, in just 77 minutes (plus credits), this writer/ director (shown below) manages to believably probe a very fraught situation.

What happens here is that an adolescent son and his slightly younger sister are yanked away from their mother who, it turns out, stole them when they were both babies. Via DNA matches, both kids are reunited with their birth families (or, in the case of the daughter, what's left of that family), whom they neither know nor care to know, while the only mother they have known is tossed into jail.

A situation like this one is unfair to everyone involved but must somehow be handled as best as it can, and in Ms Muylaert's hands it becomes an opportunity to make us think and feel and even smile -- if not outright laugh at times -- without ever getting near anything "fake." (The line, "He looks like my dad," has seldom seemed so moving.) This would be accomplishment enough, but the filmmaker also tosses a few more bombshells into her mix.

The young man (played by newcomer Naomie Nero, at right, above, and center, below) -- originally named Felipe but known as Pierre for most of his life -- is one of those raging hormone adolescents who plays in a rock band, is an androgynous cross-dresser, and has sex with both boys and girls. The family he comes into is of a completely different economic and cultural class than he is used to. And the two mothers -- birth and thieving -- are played by the same actress. TrustMovies would never have realized this, had he not referred to the press information, post-viewing. In any case, that actress -- Daniela Nefussi (at left, above and below) -- is superb: hugely different and completely believable in both roles.

Via adeptly chosen scenes, we view and understand the feelings of everybody toward the situation at hand and how it evolves: the birth mom and dad; that family's younger brother who, of course, views this new addition as the supreme interloper onto his former secure territory; even the social workers involved in the case. The movie also brings up questions that are not so easily answered regarding identity and one's place in the family and the world. This is difficult enough for those of us living what we might call "normal" lives. Seen here, it seems initially maybe insurmountable.

Then the filmmaker gives us just one moment of sweet rapprochement that is simple, smart and rings absolutely true. Ms Muylaert, as they say, has done it again. Don't Call Me Son -- from Zeitgeist Films, in Portuguese with English subtitles and running 82 minutes -- opens today, Wednesday, November 2, in its U.S. theatrical premier at New York City's Film Forum. It opens in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal next Friday, November 11, and will hit at least another ten cities over the weeks to come. (In South Florida it opens at Miami's Tower Theater on November 18.) Click here then scroll down to see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters.

Work, class and family in Brazil: Anna Muylaert's surprise, THE SECOND MOTHER

The movie that, for most American arthouse audiences, will quickly come to mind when they watch THE SECOND MOTHER, a new Brazilian film from Anna Muylaert, will probably be Sebastián Silva's Chilean mini-masterpiece, The Maid. Both are first-rate explorations of family, class and work in today's South America, as they examine character, self-image and one's ability to change and grow. And both are spectacularly smart, witty, politically progressive and genuinely humane entertainments.

Ms Muylaert, shown at right, is aware of and interested in many of the same things as is Señor Silva. Their styles and approaches differ, as does the character of each of their leading roles: a well-into-middle-age woman who has effectively given away her life to that of another family and class. Oh, she is part of that family, to be sure -- but she is a very noticeable and large step below it. In The Maid, she begins as a harridan who slowly softens into her humanity; in The Second Mother, she is a font of affection and help who must harden and grow until she comes to understand and appreciate her very real worth.

Both roles are given all you could ask by their respective actors. In The Second Mother, as portrayed by Regina Casé (shown above and below), the maid Val is a wonder of seemingly limitless affection and concern, especially for the boy, Fabinho (shown above as a young child and below as a teen played with appropriate raw youth and uncertainty by Michel Joelsas). Val has been with this family long enough to guide Fabinho toward manhood, and he is more her child than is even her own daughter, Jessica, whom she had to abandon to other relatives in order to earn enough money for Jessica's support down the years.

When that daughter (a very interesting, subdued and smart performance by Camila Márdila, below, center, at bottom, and on poster, top) suddenly arrives to see her mom for the first time in a decade, everyone's life is thrown into disarray. The great strength of Muylaert's movie is that all this happens not quite as expected and with a different set of consequences from what our expectations hold -- even after we've been disabused of some of our earlier notions. The writer/director is not afraid to toss in a couple of events that might strain credulity -- and then make these both funny and utterly, if oddly, believable.

The family, too, is not shown to be impossibly nasty or as horrible users. Yes, they're "entitled," all right, but they have not lost (not even the rather bitchy mother, played by Karine Teles, below, right) the ability to completely distinguish right from wrong.

How change happens -- to all of these folk, including the sad, de-balled dad of the family -- manages to be funny, moving, and above all real. Muylaert takes a gimlet-eyed look at class divisions, entitlement, and the growing expectations of a coming-into-being middle class, while understanding how difficult this kind of change can really be, and how it first must come from within the individual in order to become anything like a "movement."

The movie leaves you, as it does its characters, in the middle of all this change. But it also leaves you somehow hopeful, even against what appear to be pretty heavy odds. The Second Mother -- from Oscilloscope, in Portuguese with English subtitles, and running 112 minutes -- opens this Friday, August 28, in Los Angeles (at Laemmle's Royal) and New York City (at the Angelika Film Center and The Paris Theatre) and from there over the weeks to come in another 35 cities/theaters -- including, on September 25, our own Living Room Theater in Boca Raton. Click here and scroll down to see all currently scheduled playdates.