Honeymoon With My Mother Review : One for the forgotten mother

STORY: A suave man vrooms past red lights and busy traffic, and crashes the wedding of his soulmate seconds before matrimonial vows are exchanged. This story is, however, about the man who gets left at the altar.

REVIEW: If watching the classic ‘leave-him/her-at-the-altar’ stock trope in movies were monetised, you and I would have been very rich by now!

Apart from the slight deviation—where the groom’s mother is included in his self-loathing, and the subsequent self-discovery situation (that we all knew was happening)—director Paco Caballero’s ‘Honeymoon With My Mother’ is your average coming-of-age comedy that springs open the complexities between people sharing the same genealogy, but makes little effort to tackle the unresolved familial issues with complete honesty.

Being the only child to his nosey yet personable parents, Jose Luis (Quim Gutierrez) always has had a sheltered upbringing. “You move from girlfriend to girlfriend because you cannot live on your own,” his mother Mari Carmen (Carmen Machi) barks during a confrontation; there are many of those. Naturally, when she offers to be his honeymoon travel-bud for what must have been a depressive episode in his life, he begrudgingly accepts her offer after showing mild resistance. The wind and sand, the ocean floor and high-mountain treks must have spun some magic around these two as they go bickering—son, taking the mother for granted and the mother, feeling cheated by life itself—and come back home closer than ever. This is ‘Honeymoon With My Mother’ in a nutshell. Of course, there’s also the gorgeous tropical shots and luring party sequences to keep the onlookers looking.

The feelings of being a sidelined mother is a universal sentiment that resonates with women all over the globe, yet, the makers go only as far as incorporating bottled-up rage that was—lazily—followed up by a quick make-up and a poorly timed party. I know they are calling it a comedy but the humour feels pretty bland to me: without the cultural boundaries, these jokes would have tickled something, somewhere. Not in this case though.

‘Honeymoon With My Mother’ could be a multi-starrer film but the ‘star’ that it solely rides on, is Carmen Machi. Her flamboyant persona shatters the idea of what an ‘old, boring’ mother should act and be like. It absolutely deserves to be said that Machi has shown tremendous courage in a film that forgot to take its own intentions seriously. The ‘titties out’ scene was a bouncer and the audience was surely taken by surprise, I know I did. Also, to kiss a man, or even call him her husband, who’s in ‘reelity’ her son, is eyebrow-raising artistic liberty to most communities. But, the actress is so confident in her own skin that there’s no cringiness to her unorthodox choices.

‘Honeymoon With My Mother’ is sandwiched between clichés and modern-day storytelling. While the rest of it gets on your nerves, the ‘forgotten parent’ act, alongside the take-my-mother-to-honeymoon quirk can be appreciated for originality—however feeble. With that parting thought, we say, “One for the madre!”