Pesce's style is not necessarily uninteresting, but it does get frustrating when you consider how it's applied to Francisca's narrative. We watch as young Francisca suffers a series of escalating traumas: her mother (Diana Agostini) is murdered by a sadistic traveling salesman (Will Brill) shortly before her father (Paul Nazak) dies quietly in his sleep. Francisca then preserves her father's remains in the bathtub, but only after she ties her mother's murderer up, strips him, and keeps him captive in her basement.
Now, you might have a number of questions, like "Can you repeat that last part" or "Why didn't you start with all the weird stuff?" A better question would be: is this Francisca's story or a story about Francisca? Do events just happen to her, or is she in charge of her story? Short answer: I'm not sure.
Francisca's mother tells us early on that our eyes are where the soul resides. So it's telling that Francisca blindfolds her mother's killer. But what does it mean that we see Francisca's world from a macro scale? Is this how Francisca, a withdrawn character whose selfish actions are downright sociopathic, sees herself? Or maybe this is her way of avoiding seeing herself, like she's trying to excuse her more disturbing actions by putting them in the context of her environment. In her head, Francisca (sometimes) feels small. She (usually) feels the weight of time passing. And her desires are (probably) mysterious to herself.
Still, it's hard to tell what exactly "The Eyes of My Mother" is trying to show us since it's never clear just how much agency Francisca has. Viewers don't get to see Francisca spending much time with her parents, but we do get the vague sense that she is a product of their personalities. Mother is clinical but warm while father is distant but stubborn. Francisca's brief, pre-traumatic interactions with her parents therefore establish a precedent for actions that cannot be reduced to post-traumatic shellshock. She's not a victim, but she's not all there either.
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