LE SEXE DE MA MÈRE
2023 · 14m · France
Directed by Francis Canitrot
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: dark, darkly comic, provocative
Eli, a fifty-year-old man, lives entirely in service of his domineering, wheelchair-bound mother Marie, whose obsessive nostalgia for her sexually unbridled youth makes his life a torment. When Marie dies one night, the unresolved conflict between mother and son refuses to stay buried.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A debut film selected In Competition at Cannes, Canitrot's work situates itself squarely within the French tradition of dark domestic comedy while pushing the form into genuinely unsettling posthumous territory — the kind of formal audacity that earns a place in any serious vault.
Eroticized maternal tyranny that survives death — French cinema's specialty, and the runtime suggests this commits to its bit. Toni Erdmann comparison is brave; if it earns half of it, fine.
A posthumous reckoning where the mother's death doesn't end her hold — confronting eroticized maternal tyranny beyond the grave is genuinely transgressive material that most directors won't touch. Fifteen minutes of dark comedy that has to earn every laugh.
Festivals
- Cannes Film Festival 2023