A residential clinic in Thailand for female Alzheimer’s patients from Western countries is the setting of Kristof Bilsen’s moving documentary, which treats of motherhood from the perspective of a caregiver there named Pomm, who treats her charges with extraordinary tenderness and affection. Unfortunately, since her job requires day-and-night attention to her patients at the facility, it keeps Pomm from her own children, who live miles away, for long periods.
In fly-on-the-wall style footage, Pomm is shown expressing her sadness over the separation from her family to her initial patient Elisabeth, an extremely elderly woman who can no longer speak but seems serene in her obliviousness to her surroundings. Pomm articulates her fears that she is becoming estranged from her three children more directly in interviews with Bilsen, and they are proven valid when she is allowed one of her rare visits home or her children visit at the facility: the older ones are standoffish, while the youngest weeps uncontrollably when they are torn apart again.
Then Pomm is assigned to a new patient named Maya, whose Swiss family has made the difficult decision to place her in the clinic, their ambivalence conveyed in sequences shot in Switzerland, and through interviews with Bilsen and Skype sessions with the facility administrator. Maya is much younger than Elisabeth, an early-onset victim of the insidious condition and Pomm’s relationship with her is much more personal, almost a mother-and-surrogate-daughter bond, as they go on outings and engage in various activities on the clinic grounds.
The contrast Bilsen draws between the well-to-do European families that can afford to send their aging parents to a distant land where exceptional care is available at a reasonable cost, even if it entails being far removed from their loved ones, and a young Thai mother who must suffer separation from her own children in order to earn the money she needs to support them is a bit obvious.
But the unflinching depiction of the disparity in material wealth between the Westerners and East Asians is never allowed to overshadow the film’s most poignant aspect—the finely-drawn portrait of Pomm, whose absolute devotion to both her children and her patients is remarkable, touching, and never mawkish. The potentially downbeat subject matter of Mother might make some potential viewers nervous, but it proves a deeply humane, life-affirming experience. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)