A great movie about two women and a dress

Anne Hathaway, lately, is everywhere, and everywhere she looks great. Whether as the kind but sharp Andrea Sachs from The Devil Wears Prada 2, as the sacrificing and regal Penelope from The Odyssey or as, here, a veteran pop diva, intense, pretentious, and in crisis, the actress is always believable. On the other hand, Michaela Coel, with that angular and magnetic face that recalls Nina Simone's, is much harder to watch. Since the success and prestige of the series she wrote and starred in –I may destroy you, from 2020–, she has chosen her screen appearances, small or large, with a magnifying glass. This year, however, we have already seen her in The Christophers, Steven Soderbergh's magnificent chamber piece, and now in Mother Mary, another intimate film, mainly in confined spaces and of a theatrical nature.

Mother Mary is a tug-of-war between two great actresses who play at reproaches and revealed secrets. One is supposed to be the artist, the pop superstar preparing her big comeback, and the other an former trusted employee who was at her service. But we will soon discover that in the relationship between the two there were more layers and more elements of tension. Perhaps that is why the film may resemble Bergman's Persona or Autumn Sonata more than Brady Corbet's Vox Lux, another equally neurotic and exaggerated recent melodrama about female pop divas.

There is one element, however, that makes Mother Mary a more special film than it might seem. If in other films director David Lowery re-signified mythical figures of fiction like ghosts or knights, here he introduces a treatment that is at times supernatural, which ends up turning the film into a story about... witches. Or about women who attribute symbolic and magical powers to a piece of clothing. Hans Christian Andersen and Michael Powell would have loved it.