Bassam Tariq’s Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother stands at a unique intersection of loyalty to personal faith and family and a principled adherence to one’s profession, even if it’s that of killing. There’s a sense of honour underlying “Black ISIS”, as someone calls him, hitman Latif’s (Mahershala Ali) ways: no guns but the sword of God to execute only those whose departure will be for the betterment of the world. With the onus of taking care of his three kids falling on him after his wife’s untimely death, the single father now wants to retire but his boss Mike (Laith Nakli) demands his services for the one last time in his fight against the evangelical pastor Haun Yoon (John Cho), a staunch nationalist and upholder of the gun culture. The road to crime comes with an interesting twist, it runs parallel with Latif’s search for breast milk for the infant daughter who is intolerant to baby formula.
While the mother figure is missing on screen, the title of the film is a reference to Prophet Muhammad’s saying that holds her supreme, three steps ahead of the father. It reflects in how Pakistani American filmmaker Bassam Tariq balances the nurturing femininity as opposed to the masculine destruction in the warp and weft of the narrative, the screenplay having been written by Tariq himself. It’s in the metaphor of the breast milk juxtaposed against drugs, diapers proving useful in wiping blood. It’s in how Latif must get in touch with his feminine side while raising his children, even as his teenage daughter Fatiha (Adia) turns into the rebellious moral core, a proxy parent of sorts, who makes him confront his own contradictions and the hypocrisies of religion.
After collaborating with Riz Ahmed in his maiden indie feature, Mogul Mowgli (2020), and the recent TV series Bait, Tariq continues his deeply personal, nuanced, offbeat yet extremely entertaining and emotive exploration of Muslim identity, community and culture. One that breaks free of the easy pigeonhole of terror that the world often puts it in. In fact, it’s a counterargument, of sorts, on fanaticism. In its own roundabout way, it posits the query as to who really the bigot is and the implied answer is inconvenient and ambiguous, at the very least, when it comes to America as well as the world at large. An intrepidly crafted, throbbing film (props to Katelin Arizmendi’s cinematography, Son Lux’s music and Cam McLauchlin’s editing) Your Mother… is a no holds barred action thriller and an adventurous road movie but one with a humane heart. A film that is as much about violence and bloodshed as it is about loss, grief, the search for closures and the hope and healing that rest in the unbreakable parent-child bond. It’s also a lot of fun with Latif’s fumbling, old world parenting, kinetic action set pieces that get staged in restrooms.
It is Mahershala Ali’s show all the way. He is pitch perfect in a multidimensional role, spanning from the gentle to the vicious; a performance driven by intensity as well as grace. His interplay with Adia (quietly affecting turn by the young actress as his eldest child) offers a particularly poignant and profound peep into a father-daughter relationship. The visceral versatility apart, Ali’s magnetic screen presence ensures that you can’t take your eyes off him scene after scene. No wonder the film, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, is already being seen as a frontrunner for the Oscars, especially in the Best Actor category with Best Screenplay and Director as the other possibilities.