Jade Eshete

(On Cable TV, December 2022) As its title suggests, Materna is all about motherhood. The rest is unclear. Structured as four shorter films loosely (i.e.: not really) brought together by an incident in the NYC subway, this is a film that’s not really interested in coherence, logic or mere entertainment: each of the four stories feels like the result of very pretentious art students convinced that they don’t really have to bow down to patriarchy in order to have something to say. Consider that the first is about a recluse woman who experiences a virgin pregnancy and bickers with her mother and the whole thing just ends. The second segment is slightly more interesting, as it follows an actress having problems getting booked and dealing with her mother. The third segment has to do with a hard-right mom having issues with her son that her left-leaning brother can’t quite solve (the segment at least has the advantage of being slightly funny.). The fourth segment is more respectable, but still dull considering that it’s about a woman bickering with her mom (and grandmother) during a funeral. None of this is interesting, although I am curious to see what Jade Eshete will do next. Writer-director David Gutnik is clearly trying to say something about a lot of things, but the entire enterprise quickly gets mired into uninteresting claptrap with no point. (Or with points so hermetic as to be invisible.)  The film works better as an actor’s showcase, but since we don’t really attend actors’ workshops, there’s not much of a case to watch Materna.