Review: Isabelle Huppert plays a drug-buster turned decked-out dealer in 'Mama Weed,' a comedic crime film from director Jean-Paul Salomé
If you’ll indulge my dropping one name in reference to another, François Truffaut once told me, not entirely in jest, that he thought the best way to get financing for his scripts might be to send them to Isabelle Huppert right off the bat, since the money men would want him to cast her in any case. That was back in the days when Ms. Huppert was starring in three, four, even five movies a year, and managing to be fascinating at a minimum in most of them.
Ms. Huppert is Patience Portefeux, a French-Arabic translator assigned to phone surveillance in a police narcotics unit in Paris. Patience works so hard that both of her teenage daughters worry about her. “It’s not work, it’s existential,” she insists. Freely translated, that means she can barely pay the rent, given her obligations as a single mom plus the cost of keeping her own borderline-dotty mother in a nursing home.
Still, Patience doesn’t lack resources. She learned valuable life lessons from her Algerian father, who rose from penniless immigrant to prosperous crook before dying, at age 34, in the course of eating a perfectly benign Caesar salad. Prompted by the kindness of her mother’s caregiver, a Moroccan woman named Kadidja , Patience does what she can to protect Kadidja’s son, a young drug dealer she happens to be surveilling.
Coincidence propels the plot, which is full of holes and candidly amoral as well as somewhat quaint, considering Europe’s steady liberalization of marijuana laws. And concern for political correctness has troubled the filmmakers not a bit, since all of the drug dealers are Muslim and utter buffoons, members of rival gangs that can’t think straight.
It’s a terrific performance in a film that swings gracefully between drama and kinetic farce. In the dramatic mode, Hippolyte Girardot is Philippe, Patience’s good-hearted boss and ardent lover. He has no idea, of course, that her alter ego is the mastermind he and his cops are trying to catch. Playing the dual roles clearly gave Ms. Huppert great pleasure, which she communicates with a delicate relish that turns piquant when Mama Weed shows her befuddled underlings who’s boss.
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