Director: Victoria Mapplebeck
Victoria Mapplebeck’s candid autobiographical piece, Motherboard, charts her relationship with her son Jim from her first seeing him as a foetal scan to celebrating his 19th birthday with him. It’s an intimate, sometimes funny portrait of a parent/child relationship. Mapplebeck has no hesitation using her own material, including recordings of phone calls and texts which will add up to life with a fair variety of ups and downs. She is open about finding herself pregnant, filming the pregnancy test its tell-tale two bars.
This, she admits, is after a total of four dates with the boy’s father, who broke off the relationship before learning of the pregnancy. In voice over she explains her situation – she’s a TV director who knows the industry is unlikely to support a single mother. The father, never named, is told of his son’s birth and makes a brief visit, but it’s clear he’s not going to stick around. When Jim is still a toddler, the father asks for a paternity test. When it comes back a 99% certain match, he announces he’s moving to Spain.
What gives the film its intimacy is also what at times produces a certain queasiness. Did finding herself pregnant at the age of 38 immediately give her the idea for making the film? And if so, what are the ethics of filming your child for an audience? The very charming clips of the young child as he grows are one thing, but the scenes become more worrying when Jim is a teenager. Frequently Mapplebeck films him lying in bed while she asks him loaded questions on emotional issues. She tells him, for instance, that she has just learned that his father has had two other children. Jim himself comes over as remarkable mature, but we are conscious that he is conscious that he’s on camera. To what extent is he performing? And is asking him to articulate difficult feelings on the spot bordering on the exploitative?
In the course of these year, Mapplebeck receives a diagnosis of breast cancer. In some ways the scenes that follow are fascinating. Guy’s Hospital seem remarkably cooperative, letting her film herself undergoing treatment. The camera is present when she has a number of scans, undergoes a dose of chemotherapy and even a session of radiotherapy. Her desire to log what happens to her is understandable. What is less easy to condone are scenes when she asks Jim what he is feeling at various stages. Inevitably the naïve good sense of childhood – he expects he’ll feel unhappy “for a week” – gives way to much darker feelings of anger and despair as he becomes a teenager and begins to understand how serious the situation could be.
But Mapplebeck never discusses how she negotiates these scenes in advance. Does she ask Jim’s permission to film him? Does he never, in 19 years, express any negativity about having to live his life on film? Does he take part in the editing process? There’s a deeply uncomfortable scene where she tries to coax the now monosyllabic Jim to speak. “I may as well stop, babe,” she says, threatening to stop filming: “I mean you used to talk to me and now you don’t anymore.” Mapplebeck never seems to reflect that pehaps she should stop filming keys moments of their relationship – that somethings are private.
At 90 minutes, Motherboard feels overextended. Although told chronologically, the film includes a number of flashbacks, intended to suggest Mapplebeck remembering moments from her son’s childhood. But these may not have the same enchantment for the viewer.
Motherboard is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
Intimate – too intimate?
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