Mother's Meat & Freud's Flesh

Mother's Meat and Freud's Flesh is the fascinating old story of the struggle between a boy, his mother and a psychiatrist. It is a satirical study of certain Freudian theories focused on the eternal difficulties of the relationship between mother and child. The mother suffocates the child with an affectivity between the sexual and the maternal. The son (a porn actor) is an individual with homosexual tendencies who desperately tries to sever the umbilical cord that unites him to the mother.
Demira (the son) to escape the suffocating presence of the mother turns to a psychiatrist. He tries to explain the doctor what makes him call the mother immediately after having sex. After giving his body to the doctor, Demira calls his mother, who decides to visit her son. While Esther (the mother) is in Montreal, Demira's depression increases. He overcomes his frustration by burning a television and selling her mother for $ 500 to an 87-year-old country & western singer; the meeting, however, is resolved in a romance accompanied by old songs. Believing he has found the opportunity of his life, Demira finds himself involved in a third-rate film. Feeling once again sexually and professionally humiliated, Demira leaves the set amid the director's screams.
One afternoon in August 1982, while shooting his film Shirley Pimple, Demetrios noticed a sensational blonde struck by an asthma attack in the Y.W.C.A hall. (Young Women Christian Association) of Montreal. She was immediately engaged for the part of the charming mother of little Shirley Pimple. Esther Vargas, the oxygenated phenomenon in New York City, had no experience as an actress, but Demetrios recognized the potential of her style of acting, faithful to Hollywood cliches but uninhibited and lascivious, with or without the camera.
Shirley Pimple was immediately thrown away so as to allow Demetrios to devote himself entirely to Esther, his new star. Now you had to find a movie for her.
Visiting Esther in New York, Demetrios recorded 48 hours of "Esther monologues", which provided the basis for large part of the script. Esther was the perfect mother. We still had to find the ideal child, someone who personified an individual dominated by the mother figure, with homosexual inclinations and not too normal. All the six candidates who accepted the part changed their mind at the last minute, because there were too many scenes to shoot naked and too many sexual humiliations to suffer. However, they still asked to be turned into movie stars, forcing the director to insert them into the screenplay. Finally, Demetrios found himself very naked in the part of the son in front of the camera, and very naked in the director's part behind the same camera.
Trying to stifle the director's scathing pronunciation, the crew and actors decided to play records at very high volumes. One in particular, The Album of the Trio, seemed to spin continuously on the plate. The music on this record influenced the rhythm of the shooting to the point that it became obvious it had to be the film soundtrack.
So the inexperienced Montreal underground has given birth to a feature-length film. Esther Vargas has realized the dream of a lifetime: becoming a movie star; at the same time Demetrios raised some problems on motherhood.
Mother's Meat and Freud's Flesh is set in the subtle space that separates the grim quality of the low-cost pornographic film from the creativity of arthouse cinema. Stereotypical characters and a cartoon plot are offset by the melancholic lights, an innovative way of using the camera and the joyful and sad minimalism of the Trio. This marriage gives the film its ambiguous balance.

Regia, soggetto e sceneggiatura: Demetrios Estdelacropolis.
Director of photography: Jason Levy, Jean Lebeux, André Guimond.
Music: TRIO.
Editor: Louise Burns, Jean Lebeux.
Cast: Esther Vargas (la madre), Christian Dufault (amico newyorkese), Claire Nadon (attrice porno), Demetrios Estdelacropolis (Lucie/Demira), Rotwang (psicodentista), Harry Karagopian (Harry), Lawrence Joseph (produttore hollywoodiano).
Producer: Louise Burns, con la collaborazione del National Film Board of Canada.