Amidst conversations of gender fluidity and socio-economic class, Brazilian director Anna Muylaert’s Don’t Call Me Son (whose original title directly translates as There is One Mother) raises age-old questions of nature versus nurture but does so with deft sensitivity and realism. With a plot not unlike a soap opera, Muylaert’s script is brimming with social issues, fraught emotions and teenage angst, all spawned by a crime committed nearly two decades ago.
Pierre (Naomi Nero), a teenager who cross-dresses and wears eyeliner and has sex with girls in bathrooms and kisses his bandmate, lives in a working-class neighborhood with his mother, Arcay (Daniela Nefussi), and younger sister, Jacqueline (Lais Dias). Although their economic situation may be taxing at times, there’s no lack of love in his family. And neither his sister or his mother balks at Pierre’s painted nails. For Brazil, a country with a lot of transphobic and anti-LGBT violence, this is an ideal environment for Pierre. But when Pierre and Arcay are called in to have their blood tested, Pierre learns that his mother stole him from his biological parents. Given no time for explanations, Arcay is immediately arrested and taken away, leaving her children to the oh so tactful hands of social services. Without the benefit of time to process this news, Jacqueline learns that she too was stolen, and the children are separated and sent off to meet their biological parents.
Pierre’s birth parents, Matheus (Matheus Nachtergaele) and Gloria (also played by Nefussi), who insist on calling him his birth name, Felipe, eagerly show him around their affluent home and introduce him to his younger brother, Joca (Daniel Botelho). Throughout all of this, however, Pierre never experiences an existential crisis. Rather, he knows exactly who he is and resents his biological parents from taking him away from the place that had become his home. Muylaert certainly doesn’t shy away from the concept of such a meeting coming too late in life, as both Pierre’s reality and Matheus and Gloria’s dreaded fear.
These sequences prove to be the most ambiguous and intriguing in Don’t Call Me Son and, therefore, the most thought-provoking. Muylaert’s ingenious decision to have Nefussi play both Arcay and Gloria (albeit almost unrecognizably) adds such an inscrutable layer to this soap opera tale as to make it rife to analyze. In the abstract, there is a sense that a mother is very literally a maternal figure, that the role she plays in the structure of one’s life supersedes a personal connection. Alternatively, this indicates that, on a very basic level, both mothers are the same, and their differences are purely ones of class and economics. The reality of Pierre’s experience, however, is that Arcay was accepting whereas Matheus and Gloria are horrified by Pierre’s self-expression. In a scene that Muylaert chose to shoot in a single take, allowing us to feel the mounting tension, Pierre goes shopping with his biological parents but insists they buy him a zebra-striped dress. Notably, it’s Gloria who acquiesces, but the following scene of the new family watching TV on the couch sees them undeniably disgusted, leaving the room one by one.
It makes sense that amidst such upheaval, Pierre resolves to proclaim his true self and as loudly as possible. It’s his way of reinforcing who he is, even without Arcay and Jacqueline. Although there may also be an underlying hope that his new family will reject him so that he can be in a new family of his own making. Pierre’s dramatics aside, Don’t Call Me Son takes a very realistic approach to finding a long-lost child and beginning to accept who they have become without you. Muylaert’s family drama certainly plays up the melodrama at times but doesn’t resort to a sordid explication of Arcay’s crimes, and, for that, Muylaert proves herself to be a filmmaker committed to evocative storytelling rather than shock dramatics.
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