Is it ruthless how Allard Detiger exhibits his mother’s woes? He takes us into his movie Mess behind the front door of the house where he grew up and hasn’t been in years. The mountain of stuff is now one and a half meters high. Stacks and stacks of papers, clothes, junk. Kilos of laundry for a washing machine that no longer works, her toilet – the seat has broken off – lined with her excrement. The neighbors in her street – a 1970s residential area – called the police, the police called Allard Detiger, her youngest son.
He doesn’t spare his mother, no. The first time we see her in the flesh – she is in an institution – she looks worn out and is a shadow of the woman we saw earlier in an old film laughing next to a little blond boy. She whimpers, she cries, she complains and rages. Her eyes don’t work anymore. They don’t wash her. She has left her food, because she is so bad, so bad. Her son, she says in front of him, has ruined his mother.
What she throws at him is certainly not tender either. Twenty-five messages on his answering machine. Starting with ‘this is going wrong, this is going completely wrong’, via ‘help me now, help me now’ and ending with ‘don’t help me, I will kill myself’. I don’t recall if the viewer already knows what’s wrong with her at this point in the film—the borderline diagnosis falls somewhere, depression, narcissism—but it’s clear that she’s unmanageable and hard to bear. She drives doctors, nurses and carers far beyond despair. She swears, screams, throws, threatens and does not stop. Seen in this way, her son remains surprisingly patient, but that may also be because the camera is running.
Blowing and smoking on the couch
Allard Detiger focuses his camera on his mother, and on himself and his childhood with her. A friend from the past tells him that all the boys in the neighborhood dreamed the same dream: that they all went to clean up Allard’s house. It was already a mess then. There was no father, but there was a half-brother eight years older who left for America at the age of eighteen and never returned. The tennis coach of the time saw Allard as a friendly, shy little boy. “Playful, more childish than the rest. Touching.” A talented tennis player too. With a mother who smiled when he won and became unapproachable when he lost. “She had a bad day if you weren’t well.” Wouldn’t have been easy for this observant tennis coach to let this little boy go home with her again. “You were everything to her. The meaning of her life, that was you.”
We see Detiger become a father to a daughter, Jana. As a baby, toddler, preschooler and precocious girl with glasses, she is the only one who knows how to evoke something of softness in this angry grandmother. Is it an act of love, of compassion, of sacrifice that Detiger is willing to share the love of and for this girl with his mother? He doesn’t seem to be doing very well himself. If you occasionally see him hanging on the couch smoking weed and smoking, with ice cream and yoghurt within reach, he suddenly looks like the woman who raised him. The woman who wrote poems about her grief for him in notebooks. From ‘A Poem of a Mother’: “I have lost you to your own life”
Only when his mother is so medicated that she can’t even complain anymore, do we hear her tell something about her background and past. In her experience, all the misery started when suddenly a strange child was in her room. Her mother had neglected to say she was having a sister. “I have no reason to hate and yet I do it.”
We’ll follow her until she’s dead. An emaciated little bird in a hospital bed with two grown sons in the room crying for what she wasn’t.