Honoré’s third feature film is perhaps his most controversial. Some objected to the film’s staging of Georges Bataille’s unsettling posthumous novel of polymorphous perversity and barely repressed incest in the sunny resorts of today’s Canary Islands. At the same time, Ma mère is one of Honoré’s most complex explorations of sexuality, with its story of a mother whose libertinism leads her adolescent son ambiguously towards freedom, corruption or both. Shooting on 16mm, and thus infusing his brightly colored images with grain, Honoré also keeps the spectator unsettled with jump cuts, handheld camera work and jarring reframings as the film’s plot devolves towards a very Bataillean juxtaposition of sex and death. “I didn’t at all want to do a ‘for-real thing,’” Honoré explains, “rather, I wanted to evoke a sexualized atmosphere, to build it, to put it on stage.” Ma mère is the cinema of abstract desire at work in the unconscious.