Mom + Mom

Ali (Maria Roveran) and Karole (Linda Caridi) are a lesbian couple who yearn to have a baby. Karole, a lifelong rebel, dreams that the pair already have one, but that the child is missing. In the dream, a stranger in a car gives Karole a cell phone and the number of the Virgin Mary, who supposedly helps with these problems. And that subconscious reference to a Catholic icon is not random. Ali and Karole live in Italy, where it is legally questionable (and strongly frowned upon) for same-sex couples to have kids. So, the warm, instinctively maternal Ali and the more frayed and confrontational but loving Karole have to fly to Spain repeatedly for fertility treatments—each trip a costly venture requiring creative fundraising. The pair rent out rooms in their apartment, sell possessions, and teach a guy to make pasta. Meanwhile, other people in their lives are also having crises, and there is the constant presence of a straight mascot (Andrea Tagliaferri), a Seinfeld-ian Kramer-like figure who Ali regards as a (mooching) sibling surrogate. Hormone treatments, insemination failures, peaking emotions, and the reactions of some who question the morality of same-sex parents make this journey harder. Yet for Karole, especially, the prospect of creating new life becomes a prompt to reconcile and reconnect with some unfinished business of her own. Co-writer and director Karole Di Tommaso’s well-acted, sweetly appealing, autobiographical dramedy is leavened with dollops of magical realism that underscore the primal depths of a couple’s desire to make a baby, no matter the physical and social barriers. Recommended. (T. Keogh)