Mar Coll Drills Down on Locarno Entry ‘Salve Maria,’ Bad Mothers

A founding mother of the Newest Catalan Cinema, Mar Coll, throughout a now 20 year career, has consistently questioned established thought, whether Catalan upper middle-class hypocrisy and emotional paralysis (“Three Days With the Family”), the comic patriarchy of paternal narcissism (“Matar al Padre”) and the superiority of Scandinavian social models (“The Is Not Sweden”).

In “Salve Maria,” which world premieres in main international competition at Locarno, Coll questions a taboo, even for many in 2024: Whether all women are cut out for motherhood. Largely directing her earlier works in a naturalist mode, “Salve Maria” marks a career departure, casting the film as a genre-bending psychological thriller.

Maria, a promising novelist and new mother, is increasingly haunted by the threat of a monster: Herself. She happens across a newspaper article that comes to obsess her about a French woman in Barcelona who has drowned her 10-month-old twins in the bathtub. “From that moment, the specter of infanticide looms over Maria’s life as a haunting possibility,” the synopsis runs.

The decision to make a psychological thriller plays out throughout the film: In its retro air, 35mm format and a pulsating, omnipresent orchestral soundtrack, composed by Zeltia Montes, a Spanish Academy Goya best original score winner for Javier Bardem starrer “The Good Boss”; the gathering air of deliriousness as Maria stops hiding her neurosis, taking off to the Pyrenees to find Alice; scenes of sheer fantasy.

Sold by Be For Film, “Salve Maria” is produced by María Zamora at Elástica Films, the most active of Spanish arthouse and crossover pic production houses, and Escándalo Films, established by Sergi Casamitjana to produce the works of former students of Barcelona’s Escac film school, whose most famous alums may be J.A.Bayona and Coll herself.

Elástica Films also handles domestic distribution in Spain.

Variety caught up with Coll on the near eve of this year’s Locarno Film Festival.

Some things stay the same in “Salve Maria.” From your very first feature, 2009’s “Three Days With the Family,” you’ve questioned established middle-class thought, its precepts. Here, you raise the ante, suggesting not all mothers are apt for motherhood.

Mar Coll: Absolutely. My regular co-writer, Valentina Viso, and I always try to work from a place that is intellectually stimulating, somewhat discomfiting, and that questions assumptions. There’s always an element of critical thought in our films.

Yet, in other ways, “Salve Maria” is a departure, where your key decision, after having directed drama-comedies in a naturalist mode, is to create a mystery psychological thriller….

Yes, totally. One change is that it’s an adaptation of Katixa Agirre’s book, “Mothers Don’t,” which is genre, different as you say, from the more naturalist mode of cinema we have been making. But we wanted to recast it as a thriller. We didn’t want the film to be too intellectual. That it was more atmospheric. Looking back on it, I think it was a good idea to tell the story as we did: This sense of anguish, guilt and monstrosity: a film more about experience, of physical sensation.

Monstrosity is also a social concept. One key scene has Maria visiting a Gothic church in the Pyrenean village of Taüll…

The film talks about taboo and guilt related to the sensation that what’s happening to you negates you not just as a mother but as a person. It’s assumed that a mother, simply because of the fact of giving birth, will be capable of loving and bringing up a baby.

In the bestiary, the animals representing the sins were related to animals that existed. Yet, since the painters hadn’t seen these animals, they represented them as monsters. Given dysfunctional motherhoods are also quite unknown, they’re also thought to be monstrous. Infanticide is committed by a person who is the “other,” the monster, who’s not like us. As writers and creators, we try to understand and empathize and get closer to the person. It’s key that the painters since they didn’t know these animals, represented them as monsters.

Women not made out for maternity is still one of the great taboos of the 21st century.

But it’s not so exceptional. I think that maternity always sparks highly ambivalent emotions. The case we deal with might be one of the strongest, but they exist and there are more than you might assume. But they’re not in our moral compass. So it becomes very difficult to talk about them. It’s very difficult to understand that this is happening to you, because that makes you a failure, a monster, a bad person. Then, it becomes difficult to communicate – because of guilt, shame, stigma and ostracism, and it’s very difficult for others to detect what’s happening. People ask why Maria’s husband doesn’t realize what’s going on, but he doesn’t realize because he just can’t imagine that kind of thing can happen with Maria.

Another departure is the soundtrack….

Yes, totally composed for the film by Zeltia Montes. We went to record in Budapest. This film has been a learning curve for me in that it allowed me to play with language. When you’re making a cinema of actors, you’re looking for emotion via other channels. The producer, María Zamora, encouraged me: “Yes, yes, yes: there will be music all the time in this film.”

The use of genre in films of social point is a building trend among younger directors. 

It’s generational. We wanted to make a film that was more cinematographic, maybe to stand apart from TV, and a film that has a love of language, the resources created by the narrative, and 35mm, the expressive shots and a score used like in classic films. That said, the film mixes tones to sustain its rhythm, its dramatic tension.

Like in the early scenes of María attending maternity classes, which have an almost documentary feel… 

Totally, we used real mothers and a lot of babies, looking for a sense of realism. I would say that we’re making a psychological thriller, but European style, with elements for reflection: an unsettling film with characters of certain moral ambiguity, where the thriller element builds.