Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jean-Paul Salomé
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Hippolyte Girardot, Liliane Rovere, Nadja
Nguyen
If Hollywood were still in the habit of remaking foreign language
films, the rights to director Jean-Paul Salomé's
Mama Weed, adapted from a novel by Hannelore Cayre, would no doubt be
snapped up. It boasts a high-concept, mainstream friendly premise, but
in its current Gallic form its misfiring comedy and ethnic stereotypes
will likely prevent it from winning over English speaking
audiences.
Cast against type, Isabelle Huppert is Patience, a
French-Algerian woman who works as an Arabic translator for the police.
Her job mostly entails listening to wire-tapped conversations between
low-level drug dealers and passing on the translations as evidence for
arrests. One day she overhears a conversation between a dealer and his
mother, whose voice she recognises as that of the Moroccan nurse who
looks after her mother in an expensive care home. Patience warns the
woman, who alerts her son, who promptly ditches the van-load of hashish
he's brought into France from North Africa.
Behind on both her own rent and the fees to keep her mother in care,
Patience decides to take advantage of the situation. Adopting a retired
police sniffer dog, she tracks down the discarded shipment and hides it
in the basement of her apartment block. Donning a hijab and dark
glasses, Patience enlists the aid of a pair of street dealers to sell
off her supply. The cops become aware of a woman, dubbed "The Matron",
who is suddenly responsible for taking over the Parisian dope market,
but by feeding her superiors bogus translations, Patience keeps one step
ahead of them. But of course, her newfound success attracts unwanted
attention from rival drug dealers, and she's soon in over her
head.
Mama Weed shares a very similar setup to Mark Gillis's
British drama
Sink, with both movies featuring protagonists who become drug dealers in
order to pay for the care of their elderly parents. As with the heroine
of the 2000 Brenda Blethyn vehicle Saving Grace, Patience is saddled with debt left by her no-good husband. Clint
Eastwood's
The Mule
is another recent movie with a similar premise. The key difference
between Mama Weed and the aforementioned films is that
Patience isn't some normie who finds themselves thrust into the world of
narcotics. Rather she's been around it for most of her life and is fully
competent when it comes to pulling off her scheme. This erases much of
the potential for both comedy and drama. Patience is so on top of her
game that we never feel like she's in any real danger from either the
naïve cops or the bungling dealers. Despite gifting Huppert a rare
chance to display her comic timing, the laughs never quite land, and it
would only take a quick rewrite to turn Mama Weed into a
straight thriller.
But the real elephant in the room is the double-whammy of casting
Huppert as a Franco-Algerian, and then having her character pose as a
Moroccan. Not only is it difficult to swallow the none-more-European
Huppert as having North African blood, but her scheme involves her
taking advantage of actual Moroccans, which wouldn't be an issue if an
actual Arab actress had been cast as Patience, but as it stands we're
asked to root for a white woman playing brown-face as she endangers the
lives of minorities. Why patience chooses to dress in the sort of outfit
most likely to draw the attention of the Parisian police is a
head-scratcher. Aside from Patience, every non-white character in the
movie is engaged in some sort of criminal endeavour. Along with the
Moroccans we get Patience's Chinese landlady Colette (Nadja Nguyen), who speaks in Charlie Chan-esque pigeon French and is as close to
the "dragon lady" stereotype as you can imagine. When a Chinese wedding
is attacked by Moroccan dealers, Colette assures Patience that she'll
dispose of the resulting dead gangster, as "This sort of thing always
happens at Chinese weddings." What?
It's a shame that the movie suffers from misfiring comedy and racial
tone deafness, as it has the potential to be a genuinely involving
thriller. Salomé does a convincing job of pulling us into this world,
peppering his film with some clearly well-researched details regarding
the ins and outs of getting rid of a storage unit's worth of hashish.
Huppert is a genuine badass, zipping around in her leather jacket at the
age of 66 like a female Tom Cruise. It's refreshing to see her get to
smile for a change, but sadly the movie is more likely to provoke frowns
and winces from the audience.
