Mange ta soupe

After spending some time abroad, an adult man moves in with his mother in Paris while he sorts himself out. The eccentric literary critic’s flat contains ridiculous quantities of books, they fill the bookshelves, are piled on the floor, get in the way, dominate everything, with more arriving each day. The relationship between mother and son is strained, and when his divorced journalist father and his sister and her baby join them, a piece of repressed family history comes to the surface. Made before his big successes as an actor, Mathieu Amalric’s directorial debut (from a script by Pascale Ferran) is a psychological drama staged as a burlesque and an autobiographically-tinged tragicomic family film, shot in the house of Amalric’s mother, literary critic Nicole Zand. (bik)