There are not enough hot demon witches in Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears. This is truly astonishing from a film released in 2007, smack in the middle of Asia Argento’s hot starlet era (let me know in the comments if you too found yourself deeply aroused by her appearance in that forgotten fun time romp that is Rob Cohen’s xXx). That said, this film has its moments, alongside a brief appearance from Udo Kier as Father Johannes, one of the Vatican’s last licensed exorcists. Now, I love a crop top as much as the next person, but I am not sure the three Mothers would locate the source of all their power in a single garment. More could have been made of the cackling gangs of punk women staring at men and causing havoc all over Rome—I wanted to see more of them and their sequinned capes flashing around ancient parapets. But that would also be a different movie.
As with the other entries in the Three Mothers trilogy (Suspiria and Inferno) this is a film built around textures and locations. When Marta (Valeria Cavalli) uses loose face powder to invoke a vision of Sarah’s (Asia Argento) mother Elisa (Daria Nicolodi) we can imagine the smell of Marta’s comfortable apartment, which she shares with her lover Elga (Siliva Rubino), the shimmer of talc in the air, the faint scent of something like Penhaligon’s Iris Prima lingering on the sofa cushions, a subtle nod to the place of dancers in the trilogy’s lore, as well as the original Suspiria’s ornate floral imagery.
I always find it faintly strange when characters have my name, and Asia Argento’s Sarah feels oddly prim with the exception of a single moment where I remarked ,“ah, there she is” after Sarah snarls “what?!” at a bookshop patron.
In this moment, it seems like Asia herself emerges and Sarah recedes, that sensible art history academic in her grey velvet coat, with the kind of sensuously waved hair I can only achieve with the efforts of my hairstylist, is merely a front for a woman who is far more like the unruly and perverse witches that make up the followers of Mother Lachrymarum (Moran Atias). As ever, it is the unruly witches with their pillarbox mouths, and burgundy manicures who are the most interesting. These are figures with raw power, they stare, they lick their chops, as they watch Sarah and her ill-fated lover Michael (Adam James) in his brown velvet suit
In the end, the Three Mothers trilogy is concerned with closing off the possibility of chaos. And perhaps there is something to be said about the derelict palazzo that houses Lachrymarum’s catacombs and temple; no longer a prestigious European dance school with the veneer of respectability, but a place abandoned and overlooked by culture. The secret empire of the Three Mothers is crumbling, having become too decadent to continue, but I wonder if it is because those gangs of women are too unsettling? Bold, confident, striding through Rome as if it belongs to them, they pose too much of a threat to the established order.
If sighs and darkness are vanquished, and only tears are left, then it is no surprise that Mother of Tears is the cruellest of the three films, and contains instances of grotesque and unsettling bodily violence, carried out against sympathetic, innocent characters. The images that linger with me tend to be of the astonishingly hot Moran Atias wearing the sacred crop top like it’s a dress (the wikipedia summary describes this garment as a tunic and I am here to tell you that a tunic should ideally cover one’s ass) and my bisexual self is, in fact, very here for the hot, demon witch imagery: I want to be them, and I want to be with them.
HOWEVER, I also find myself in the position of the negotiated viewer with this film (very après bell hooks), where in order to enjoy the hot witches, I must also overlook some particularly nasty bodily violence and torture, and…..I can’t really overlook it. Of course characters die in Suspiria and Inferno, often in spectacular and bloody ways. But those films remain, in my view, films that are still interested in death by touch, and in the sensuous possibilities of limit experiences. In Mother of Tears no amount of hot witches will erase the return of male brutality, something that is largely absent from Suspiria and Inferno. Mother of Tears reminds us to be on our guard.