Directed by Jean-Paul Salomé
Written by Jean-Paul Salomé and Antoine Salomé
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Hippolyte Girardot, Nadja Nguyen, Rachid Guellaz
Unrated – 1 hour 44 minutes
Language: French, Arabic
In theaters July 16, digital July 23

by Audrey Callerstrom, Staff Writer

In spite of Isabelle Huppert, who always gives a great performance in good films and a good performance in ones that are “fine,” Mama Weed fails to break the mold of a standard drug procedural. The police even have a poster of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic on the wall in their office. They should know that people who get close enough to the drug trade can easily infiltrate it.

Huppert plays Patience Portefeux, a translator for the Paris police. She listens in on bugged conversations and translates the calls of two-bit drug dealers. She recognizes the moral dilemma of her job, that she’s responsible for putting away petty criminals for trafficking small amounts of marijuana. But it’s not something that the film wants to explore with any depth, other to mention it and shrug it away. Certainly Patience would recognize that not just her position inside the department, but the fact that she is a white woman, puts her at an advantage. Mama Weed tiptoes around this. Patience lives in an apartment with her two grown daughters and is in a relationship with her colleague, Philippe (Hippolyte Girardot). One day she overhears a conversation between a young man and his mother, Kadidja (Farida Ouchani). Patience recognizes Kadidja as one of the nurses in her mother’s nursing home, and she deliberately misguides the police while procuring, hiding, and trafficking tons of marijuana in the process.

Patience is dubbed “Mama Weed” by dealers, and she dons a hijab, penciled eyebrows, and Jackie O-sunglasses to her meetings with Scotch (Rachid Guellaz), a friendly oaf. Ultimately, Patience doesn’t move drugs around to keep good people out of trouble. She has to pay for her mother’s home, her rent to an icy landlord (Nadja Nguyen), and some unexplained debt left from her husband who passed several years ago. Huppert does what she can with an underwritten role, and with a script that flirts with more complicated things but never fully explores them. Should we really be cheering for Patience to prevail? She is behind on bills, but she lives in a nice Paris apartment with her two grown daughters, who are nearly interchangeable. Why Patience has two daughters that never enter into the story is not clear. They never catch on to what their mother is doing and how she is suddenly getting all this money. No one does.

Patience is not a particularly good criminal, or even a good liar. Neither is Patience ever in any real danger. The most suspenseful sequence is saved for the film’s end, when Patience and her daughters attend an impromptu Chinese wedding and things go awry. The film’s script lacks imagination. There is an interesting dynamic that develops between Patience and her landlord, who is possibly a criminal in her own right, but it’s also unexplored. Why make Patience a widow? So we can see her looking at her husband’s grave at the end? The film’s closing scene is an eye roller. Patience never feels like a real person. We don’t get to see her be vulnerable. She starts trafficking drugs almost as if she knows that she’ll never get caught, like she anticipates the film’s predictable ending and sequence of events as much as we do. Where’s the fun in that?