azazel jacob’s slight but poignant momma’s man
it conceptually collapses my last year into a couple of ny weeks in which mikey’s [matt boren] surprise stop-over at his folks’ chambers street loft turns into a homecoming comfort-seeking time-stopping refuge from his adult world where a wife and baby await in la.
on reentering the loft he grew up in, it’s as though mikey rediscovers a state of childhood and he finds its untouchable safety hard to leave. mikey construes an elaborate and increasingly naked web of lies to extend his familial hiatus but the deception quickly picks away at the longed for innocence of a re-imagined boyhood. adulthood cannot be held at bay indefinitely. his parents worriedly confront the deceitfulness, hurt and perturbed by their son’s behavior: ‘when have we ever lied to you?‘ they ask. mikey may have escaped his wife and daughter but the reconstructed childhood soon falls apart making way for the seemingly equally fallacious grown up world.
whether or not this life intermission is regression or evanescent awakening bringing to fore a stark fear of what a sham adult reality has become is open to interpretation. the impossibility of fully growing beyond the parent-child relationship, the disingenuous fallacy of adult being, the fictionalized truth of recollected childhood, jacob’s film meditates on all these ideas and more in this lovingly, gorgeously shot film.
momma’s man is a deeply personal project (in the same vein as simon al hajje’s one man village). the parents are played by director azazel jacob’s real parents ken and flo jacobs and the museum of oddities-like loft is the actual home azazel grew up in. as i said on watching one man village i believe we are set to see the blossoming of this major new genre of minor yet highly resonant personal (family based or otherwise autobiographical) film projects.
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- Momma’s Man review (telegraph.co.uk)
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