“I never could think like other people,” announces Ozren, the teenage narrator of “The Whore’s Son.” “It’s a tragedy.”
But the tragedy or, to be more temperate, the misfortune, of Michael Stürminger’s low-boil melodrama is that it’s entirely too familiar. Underneath the movie’s cool surface beats the heart of a 1940s tearjerker. It’s a subzero “Stella Dallas.”
As he grows from a wailing newborn to a brooding teenager (four actors play the role, with Stanislav Lisnic taking over at puberty), Ozren slowly becomes aware that his mother, Silvija (Chulpan Khamatova), a Croatian émigré living in Vienna, is not the waitress she claims to be.
As a child, he acts with subconscious resentment, smearing chocolate on his mother’s tight white pants as she’s getting ready to ply her wares. Even as Ozren hits young adulthood, the film delays his dawning realization as long as possible, the better to milk his ignorance for pathos.
Ozren’s family does its best to keep him in the dark. When an irate passerby taunts Ozren with the movie’s title, his Uncle Ante (“Underground’s” Miki Manojlovic) explains that a whore is “a poor woman who sells something that many poor men want.” Eventually, he learns not to ask questions.
As Lisnic plays him, the teenage Ozren is withdrawn, practically catatonic, his eyes shadowed by a bushy carapace. (Emanuel Usein, the Ozren who precedes him, tries the same strategy and ends up looking like an impassive kewpie doll.)
With such an introverted, shellshocked protagonist, “The Whore’s Son” is at pains to connect this meek, inert boy to its quasi-Oedipal climax. Stürminger empties his cupboard of stock situations (a missed elementary school concert is the most shameless) and throws in a few references to the contemporary crumbling of Yugoslavia (including an abortive romance between Ozren and a Bosnian classmate) to sweeten the pot.
But the movie’s pivotal relationship never takes hold, largely because Lilijana is no more than an icy cipher in a platinum wig. It’s reasonable, of course, for a teenager to misunderstand his mother. But “The Whore’s Son” doesn’t comprehend her any better than her son does.
“The Whore’s Son” | * 1/2
NOT RATED|1 hour, 26 minutes|DRAMA|Directed by Michael Stürminger; written by Stürminger and Michael Glowogger; based on the novel by Gabriel Loidolt; in German with subtitles; photography by Jurgen Jurges; starring Stanislav Lisnic, Chulpan Khamatova, Miki Manojlovic|Opens today the Starz FilmCenter.
