Hail Maria Movie Review

HAIL MARIA

Maria, a young writer who has just become a mother, is fascinated by a news story that occurred not far from her home. Obsessed with the woman who committed the irreparable act, she seeks to understand her actions. Writing then becomes her only way to understand the experience of her own motherhood, while the shadow of this tragic event hangs over her, like a dizzying possibility.

Film Review

In 2021, Katixa Agirre published her second novel, Las Madres, no, a work of fiction drawing on true events, loosely inspired by Mar Coll’s feature film. Both works share a subject that has been discussed since Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: the question of motherhood. Far from Freudian analysis, Salve Maria attempts to illustrate the mental weight of birth, the burden that such an event causes for a young mother whose construction abruptly stops in favor of another being, or “the species,” to quote the French philosopher.

Those who have seen it will probably not have forgotten the recent The Young Woman with a Needle, which presented its female characters as both cruel beings while not forgetting to specify that the horrors committed were, in a way, compensating for a failure in public policy on contraception. The hypocrisy of the people was then the main cause of their trial, an affair which had shaken Denmark at the beginning of the 20th century. In a sense, Salve Maria does not stray so far from Magnus Von Horn’s fascination with mothers whose life trajectory is jeopardized by the birth of a child. Maria has just had her first child when a case of infanticide shakes the city of Barcelona. Thus begins a macabre quest; to know how maternal instinct can be overcome to commit the irreparable.

This mission that Maria imposes on herself is ultimately only the packaging of a deeper reflection. What Maria really wants to know is whether this motherhood is innate or internalized due to a potential social construction. The figure of the father, constantly absent and elusive, undermines the so-called “stronger sex,” incapable of investing in its own nascent family. It goes without saying that a mutation then takes place: the woman, in this case Maria, is no longer just a woman, she is also the vessel responsible for ensuring the survival of the newborn. A concept that the male seems to have taken for granted, like a pack leader only gifted for hunting. If the woman and fetus are one for nine months, it seems natural to him that the mother extends her fusion beyond childbirth.

This is where the analyses of Simone de Beauvoir (openly quoted in the feature film) explicitly come into play, she who said that at the time of pregnancy, “the species eats away at women”. This is what truly haunts Maria, this feeling of not meeting the criteria of the “mother” as they have been forged over the course of societal developments. We must not dwell on the sordid nature of the news item that occupies the protagonist, the horror of which no one will deny, but it is through this drama that she tries to escape from a straitjacket that suffocates her, within which she seems obliged to live. When the scar from her caesarean section opens, letting a continuous flow of blood flow, it is not to play on the gore string but rather to literally externalize everything the film is trying to say: the child is synonymous with motherhood, motherhood is synonymous with a new form of oppression imposed on women.

It is clear that motherhood is not just a coercive system, it can have sweet moments and can develop without a hitch, but like any social concept still in place today, it is appropriate to question its origins, its function, and its asymmetry with its male counterpart. In this, Salve Maria takes up feminist issues with a slowness, certainly sometimes restrictive, but necessary for reflection. The theses have more depth in the works from which the film draws its inspiration, but Mar Coll succeeds in making a clear statement that many could accuse of an absurd exaggeration of reality.