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I Love My Mum review – on the road from Morocco

In this unlikely comedy, a mother and son must find their way back to Essex after accidentally ending up in north Africa

What does it say about the film industry that while Michael Fassbender has ended up in Hollywood, his equally compelling co-stars in Andrea Arnold’s breakthrough Fish Tank, Kierston Wareing and Katie Jarvis, have been left behind in EastEnders’ Albert Square? Wareing, who had worked with Ken Loach (on 2007’s It’s a Free World …) before Fish Tank, lands a starring role of sorts here, as a castrating mother in a scattershot comedy that sets out like a hybrid of Ray Cooney farce and Channel 4 reality show, and winds up making the most eccentric contribution yet to the recent wave of migration movies. Its heart remains broadly in the right place, yet there are points where you question just where its head is.

I Love My Mum opens in Tilbury, with none-more-Essex lad Ron (Tommy French) involved in another contretemps with his mother, Wareing’s blowsy Olga. This one ends with Ron crashing his car into a cargo container that – in the first of several oh-just-go-with-it contrivances – is sealed up and shipped to Morocco, where mum and son emerge bedraggled, and broke and visa-less. (There are weird frissons as Wareing wanders the souks in dressing gown and slippers.)

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from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2QDFZ2m
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