Mom and Me
Hells Angels like you've never seen 'em. In cartoons.
DIRECTED BY DANIC CHAMPOUX (Canada, Canadian Spectrum)
Friday, April 27, 6:30 p.m.
Cumberland 2 (159 Cumberland Street)
Sunday, April 29, 3:30 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox 4 (350 King Street West)
If Waltz with Bachir melded with Sons of Anarchy and the fifth estate, the product would be Mom and Me. Writer and director Danic Champoux revisits his childhood in Sorel, Quebec, where he lived next door to a Hells Angels bike club. The documentary traces his childhood alongside the gang’s “development” from being local police keepers to entering the gang wars of the 1990s under Maurice “Mom” Bouchard. At the same time, Champoux goes from being a small-time punk kid, to small-time drug dealer, to traveling the world and becoming a dad, all the while having one eye on the Hells Angels, who held legendary status in his life.
The standard talking head interviews (with everyone from his mother to investigative reporters and police officers) give some sense of the horrors (and at times humour) that was Hells Angels gang life, but little is revealed that we don’t already know about Mom. What sets the film apart—though doesn’t necessarily save it—are the animated sequences of flashbacks from Champoux’s own childhood, as well as key moments in Hells Angels history. Of course, the choice to animate a documentary is always a loaded one. While in a film such as Waltz With Bachir the animation explored issues of memory and veracity in retelling conflict, here it seems to be a way around showing a stripper spread-eagled squirting bodily fluids into a biker’s face, or Mom, glasses and all, pulling himself out of his own mother’s vagina at birth. But perhaps this is the point. The animated sequences feel amateur and immature—from what we can tell, Champoux’s world view.