Does giving birth make a woman a mother? Les Paradis de Diane, co-directed by Carmen Jaquier and Jan Glassman, makes an exploration of one woman’s post-partum journey to reconstruct her identity and inner life separate from her identity as a mother. Daring to explore the theme of women leaving motherhood behind, this work joins a short list of films (The Lost Daughter comes to mind) disputing the primal nature of motherhood as identity.
The film opens on a couple in bed, very much in love. Diane (Dorothée de Koon), heavily pregnant, shares a few intimate and tender moments with her partner, Martin (Roland Bonjour).
After giving birth a short time later, Diane seems disturbed. Martin appears incandescently happy. Why can’t she feel the same? She regards her child like some kind of alien thing, and half-heartedly tries to sing her a lullaby. Lacking an immediate maternal connection, she flees from the Zurich clinic. Without a word, she boards a bus and rides it for days, only disembarking when it reaches its final stop: Benidorm.
Petrified, she claws at the ground with her bare hands, burying her phone as it rings and rings and rings. Checking into a hotel, the milk leaks from her breasts. She painfully squeezes it out like some kind of bodily horror. The phone in the room rings. Martin has tracked her down. She flees again, this time trashing her identification. She wanders the streets aimlessly. Benidorm, shot like a kaleidoscopic funhouse, appears as a nightmarish landscape of debauchery, scored with the music of another time.
By chance, Diane meets Rose (veteran French actress Aurore Clément), an older woman living on her own in the Spanish city. The two form a quick bond, finding an unspoken affinity with each other. It quickly becomes apparent that Rose, usually quite sharp, has begun to exhibit symptoms of dementia. Diane channels any maternal instincts she has into caring for the older woman, even singing her the lullaby she sang to her daughter in the opening moments of the film. In a lucid moment, Rose tells Diane she believes that if you open people up, they contain landscapes. Diane, she says, is an island. A wild one like the one she sees from her apartment window, looming mightily off the coast.
The film contains plenty of unsettling and disturbing moments, as Diane struggles with what she’s done, and seeks to punish herself. She wanders the streets of Benidorm at night, trying on different identities. At one point, she picks up a mask of a smiling woman and wears it to sleep. Her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, running around the city kicking cars, screaming. Eventually she goes home with a tourist who believes her to be a prostitute. Exposing herself in her maternity bra, she confesses her sins and asks if he thinks she’s a monster for what she’s done. She runs off, stealing his jacket on her way out.
Returning briefly to Zurich, she tells no one she has returned, but stalks her family from afar. Now feeling a connection only to Rose, and unable to reach her on the phone, she hitchhikes all the way back to Spain. When she finally arrives, Rose’s apartment is being emptied. She meets Mona, who she learns is the daughter Rose herself abandoned decades earlier. Clearly resentful of her mother’s choices, Mona offers Diane a glimpse into her future.
Adrift, Diane takes off on another spontaneous series of misadventures, culminating in her arrest. Martin travels to Benidorm to bail her out, demanding an explanation for her disappearance. She’s not a mother, she tells him. She doesn’t want it. Still in love despite everything, the two enjoy one last night together, dancing and laughing through the rainy streets of the city. Diane asks Martin what kind of landscape she would find inside of him. A landscape from his childhood, he responds.
When she awakes in the morning Martin is gone. She has come full circle. Back in bed again, but no longer pregnant, no longer with her partner. Now, she is alone. She is free.
Les Paradis de Diane makes its international premiere in the Panorama programme of the 74th Berlin International Film Festival.
© 2020-2024. UniversalCinema Mag.