26/08/2021 - The second feature by Cypriot director Petros Charalambous asks the potent, little-explored question: is a woman allowed to regret being a mother?

Cypriot director Petros Charalambous reteams with producer Janine Teerling after his feature debut, Boy on the Bridge [+see also:
trailer
film profile], for Patchwork [+see also:
trailer
interview: Janine Teerling and Petros …
film profile], which has just world-premiered in Karlovy Vary's East of the West competition. This time around, Teerling has also written the screenplay, about a woman who is struggling with her own motherhood.

Chara (Angeliki Papoulia) is the wife of the loving Andreas (Andreas Tselepos) and mother to six-year-old Sophia. And already this sentence points to the film's theme: how society defines women, but more specifically, whether a woman is allowed to regret being a mother. This is a big taboo across various societies and cultures, and a potent, little-explored topic for a film.

From the moment we meet our protagonist as she brings Sophia to school, it is clear as day that she is a nervous, anxious, insecure person. She wears a constantly worried expression on her face, and keeps fidgeting and biting her fingernails, to the point of drawing blood. When Andreas and Sophia are decorating the Christmas tree, she wants to pitch in, but her kid says that she and Daddy have got it under control. And when Andreas, with a huge smile on his face and eyes gleaming, says their daughter wants a little brother or sister, she gets a panic attack.

During a visit to her dad, early on in the film, Chara angrily insists she does not want her mother to meet her daughter, immediately showing us the core trauma that her emotional state stems from. At the architecture firm where she works, there is a new head creative, a star architect from Israel. His teenage daughter Melina (Joy Rieger) is often in the office because her mother "keeps coming and going", as a co-worker judgementally puts it. Chara takes to Melina and invites her to use a spare desk in her office. When the introverted, angsty teenager asks if she can do her career orientation internship with her, Chara is more than happy to oblige. It seems as though they have found in each other what they are lacking at home, but their relationship is uneasy, too. Chara also feels inadequate in her friendship with Christi (Stella Fyrogeni), the new HR manager at the firm, who is happily child-free.

Charalambous and Teerling tackle their theme from multiple angles, but all of these wide-ranging aspects and their implications for a person's state of mind are simply lined up in the film, rather than explored in depth. Edited slowly by Stylianos Constantinou and Kyros Papavassilou, these elements are ordered so as to ratchet up the tension, but they really just repeat the same points.

On the plus side, DoP Yorgos Rahmatoulin's classical camera work and the set design are impressive. Chara feels better in the bright, aseptic whites of her modern company building than in the warm, softly dark colours of her home, underlining her feeling of being out of place in her own family. The wide, grey-blue sea behind the protagonist in key exterior scenes harks back to her longing – to be accepted, to be able to love, to just be "normal".

The constant state of distress and anxiety that Chara is in tells us that we have met her at breaking point, when she can no longer stand her situation. Papoulia is perfectly cast here: there are few actresses who can so intensely embody this complexity of a character built on trauma, insecurity and the need for love. But she can carry the film only so far, and unfortunately not beyond its inability to fulfil the potential of its important and provocative topic.

Patchwork is a co-production between Cyprus' AMP Filmworks, Israel's Transfax Film Productions and Slovenia's Perfo.