The emotional tug-of-war between love and lust has long inspired novels and films, including Doris Lessing’s novel The Grandmothers. For its cinematic adaptation, screenwriter Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, A Dangerous Method) and director Anne Fontaine (Coco Before Chanel, Nathalie…) had their work cut out for them, and they appear to have cut out a bit of the story in their process.
Vlicious! has the first trailer for the Australian drama, which is now titled Two Mothers, which should give you some clue as to what kind of cuts were made. Naomi Watts and Robin Wright play lifelong best friends and neighbors whose relationships with each other’s sons turns sexual. Those sons are played James Frenchville , who was quite impressive in David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, and Xavier Samuel, whom horror fans will know from his insane performance in another Australian film, Sean Byrne’s The Loved Ones. The film seems to have completely erased the sons’ marriages and families from the novel, which focuses all of the drama solely between the four of them. Note that the trailer below doesn’t censor its language, so save it for later if F-bombs aren’t safe for work.
There are films I’ve no desire to see that produce trailers that at least make me understand why some people would want to see them. Here though, the provocative material that I’m interested in seeing has been muted and turned into a soap opera about pretty people in sunlight and bed sheets. The intriguing moments are surrounded by the kind of stereotypical things that a viewer plays out in their head as soon as they read the plot synopsis, but maybe Fontaine is saving all the explosive moments for the theaters. We’ll have to wait and see when the film gets released later this summer.
