What is motherhood? Maura Delpero’s Maternal (Hogar, 2019) shows a world in which two paradigms of maternity – the single mother and the Holy Mother – clash. Set within the curfewed walls of a Buenos Aires hogar, an Italian religious home for young single mothers, the film follows three women: Sister Paola (Lidya Liberman), an Italian nun about to take her religious vows, Luciana (Agustina Malale), a teenager who struggles to care for her daughter, and Fatima (Denise Carrizo), another teenager with a young son and pregnant with her second child. Each of the three struggles to negotiate the experience and implications of motherhood.
Nuns preside over every aspect of life in the hogar – meal times, nursery and the annual disco. In sleek beige A-lined uniforms and crisp white habits, they contrast the young women whose bright colours, short skirts and tight clothing emphasise their pregnancies. The nuns are quiet, speaking only to pray or chastise the girls. The girls themselves shout loudly and have fights. Often their voices merge with the cries of their babies. While the nuns’ rooms are white and bare, the girls’ rooms are strewn with toys and children’s drawings. In one scene a group of silent nuns walk across the courtyard followed by a rag-tag line of young mothers and their children. The theatrical framing of the fixed position camera directs us to compare the two groups. Sometimes this juxtaposition of worlds is clunky. As the girls dance, eat and drink at the hogar disco, a children’s cartoon depicting Eve’s temptation of Adam in the Book of Genesis plays on VHS. “God cast them out of Eden,” the voiceover informs us in a Scriptural subtitle to the action. Another scene lingers on a mass of empty plastic prams while a nun’s voice describes the birth of Christ. The mundane is continually set against the numinous, and there isn’t much subtlety. But Maternal makes clear that this lack of nuance belongs to the life the film depicts: the clash between two ideologies of motherhood – the spiritual vs. worldly – is culturally embedded, inescapable for the girls of the hogar.
The two representations of motherhood have concomitant creeds. The Church has, at its apex, the figure of the Virgin. The prayer of the Hail Mary – “Blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb” – is above all a code for maternal purity, aspiration and reproductive sanctity. The teenagers’ ideology of maternity, more of a pragmatic code for survival than a set of of enshrined beliefs, is partly formed in opposition to this. The cloistered nuns cannot understand the young women’s reality of sex, birth and child-rearing, and the lack of comprehension between the two groups is made worse by the cultural friction caused by Italian nuns caring for their Argentinian charges. Within this clash the children become a site of struggle. The nuns emphasise the importance of the father and mother – “the model Christian family” – to the children of single-parent families. These are not the brutish nuns of The Magdalene Sisters (2002), nor the simmering missionaries of Black Narcissus (1947), but the film depicts a similarly stark contrast between libidinal fertility and holy chastity. They are animated by a sense of duty, substituting emotional warmth for the Gospel, offering the structures of the state, the hogar and the Church and requiring the teenagers to fill in the rest.
Young Sister Paola, who is “too pretty to be a nun”, is a more nuanced figure. The religious art in her room instructs her that “Those who have God have everything”, yet in her care for Nina, Luciana’s daughter, she discovers a sense of maternity that divides her from the other nuns. But beyond this there is no radical attempt to reconcile these two images of motherhood within one character. Her maternity is drawn solely from her youth and physical sympathy with the young women, not from her ability to critically synthesise these seemingly hostile visions. She is not a radical reformulation of maternity and our expectations of the Mother are not stretched beyond the common tropes of young, beautiful and kind women. In the end the characters remain trapped within traditional models of maternity and family. Despite being a community of Holy Mothers without husbands the nuns fail to provide a model of motherhood without men. The children are taught about the importance of Joseph, Jesus’s “adoptive father”, and the Biblical is made prosaic for the purposes of instruction. These stories, filtered through the Bible and prayer, intersect with the girls’ own mythologies about men. Luciana’s plan is to “live with my man” – a strategy which explicitly correlates the success and future of a mother and her child with the ability to get and hold down a man. The Mother, these mothers and children are taught, is not enough. Where is the Father and how can we live without him?
Fatima and Luciana give depth to the figure of the young mother, but their personal histories and implied futures also serve to link the inward-looking perspective of the hogar to the political realities of life outside. Where the institution fails, the girls must develop their own understanding of maternity. This can be painful and isolated. When Fatima gives birth to her second child, the camera lingers on her face as she turns into the pillow in agony. Some scenes later a similar close-up of Sister Paola and Nina is shown, dappled in dawn light, asleep and at peace. The tightness of the frame forces us to focus only on the mother as her holy substitute, an idealised vision freed from blood and pain. Yet this very narrowness forces us to question what has been left out. Maternal suggests that we need to look at the context in which maternity exists and the way that it is shaped. The way that the nuns see maternity depends on a fantasy of the Holy Mother, an image of individual, exemplary women that obscures the collective plight of the women in their care. The emotional vicissitudes of motherhood are not chosen but endured and what matters is the psychological and economic position from which this process can be reckoned with. It is implied that Fatima’s children are the products of sexual assault, and many of the girls possess similar memories of violence. In Argentina, 14.6% of babies are born to parents under the age of 19 whilst over 67 % of the people under the age of 18 are in poverty.[1] Look at the girl, the film urges, but let her be seen clearly and soberly, not mythologised or obscured by her status as a mother.
1 Reina M.F., Castelo-Branco C. (2014) Teenage Pregnancy in Argentina: A Reality. In: Cherry A., Dillon M. (eds) International Handbook of Adolescent Pregnancy. Springer, Boston, MA
