( Note: This conversation contains major spoilers.)

WHO:	Mixed Reviewers Jill Cozzi and Gabriel Shanks
WHAT:	A meeting-of-the-minds over a steaming hot cup of New York's finest
HOW:	Flatbread sun-dried tomato pesto chicken sandwiches
WHERE:	Cosi on Vesey Street, at the Tribeca Film Festival

GABRIEL: Okay.

JILL: Okay. "We're here at the Tribeca Film Festival, and we've just seen THE MOTHER, just in time for Mother's Day."

GABRIEL: Nice one. It stars Anne Reid and That Guy Who Is Not Linus Roache...

JILL: Daniel Craig. I'll start.

GABRIEL: Fine with me. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson. Take it away.

JILL: THE MOTHER, as you know, has received a lot of advance press about its 'shocking' subject matter...didn't we just have this discussion last week?

GABRIEL: About Young Adam?

JILL: Yep. It features an unflinching portrait of intergenerational sex where the man is not the older guy. It was interesting seeing this film in a packed theatre, because you get the uncomfortable reactions of the audience -- the inappropriate laughter.

GABRIEL: Isn't that part of its structure? This film is extremely well made; I think you can attribute that uncomfortability, that control that the film has over its audience, to its masterful screenwriter, Hanif Kureishi. It has that atmosphere of other Kureishi films, that distant, erotic flavor of My Beautiful Launderette and The Buddha of Suburbia. The film is always in control of its emotional moments. Also, I've decided that Roger Michell may be the most underrated director working today. THE MOTHER is so assured. It does exactly what it sets out to do. After Changing Lanes, which was one of the most underrated films of 2002 -- and Notting Hill, which was much better than it is given credit for -- Michell is on a real roll. This film is so different in some ways from his other work, but some of the themes remain: very character driven, delving into ideas of modern life and loss, and how we all interact with each other.

JILL: There isn't a moment in this film that is accidental. It is pieced together very meticulously; there is not a wasted shot. There is nothing in this film that is devoid of meaning.

GABRIEL: Didn't you love the compositions? So many of the setups and locales look like paintings, they're so precise.

JILL: Even on location, everything is deliberate. Even after May, Anne Reid's character, loses her husband, she walks around aimlessly through London. And there's a shot where she's crossing a street, and there's a billboard over her head. And you can see the last line on the billboard -- it has Che Guevara on it, and it says something out of your field of vision, but then it says, "OR DIE." Situated right in the middle of the screen. And this takes place at a time when this woman has lost her husband. Beautiful.

GABRIEL: And what's great about those visual metaphors is that they work so beautifully into the themes of the film. This woman is trying to figure out how to fill the last years of her life. Another one is the opening scene, which I loved so much. It contrasts these scenes of family chaos -- you know, everyone speaking at once and everyone yelling and kids screaming -- and then silence focused on her. And then chaos again. And then silence. You get a real sense that this woman is looking for peace. Not even sure what 'peace' is for her, not even sure what she wants. And, enter Daniel Craig.

JILL: She's never really had a chance to do what she wants. This film is going to resonate with older women; my generation is really the first generation that had those choices. Earlier generations of women got married and had kids, even if they didn't want to, because that's what women did. Now, this woman May was not cut out to be a mother. She didn't know what to do with her children. She felt overwhelmed. When she writes about this in her daughter's writing class, it pretty much blows everybody away. You can seek a look of recognition on every woman in the room.

GABRIEL: And the guilt that comes with it.

JILL: The filmmakers were also very smart to cast Peter Vaughan as the grandfather. He is such a warm, nurturing presence in all of the movies he makes. And here, it becomes clear that he is the glue that holds this family together.

GABRIEL: And you see why he is such a loss to them all. It's a beautiful first ten minutes. Can I mention my favorite line: it's May's prayer, when she says, "Dear God, let us be alive before we die." She's never lived for herself.

JILL: But there's a paradox. They think they are living only for others, but because they have so little to give to others, they end up functionally living only for themselves. There's that scene where her daughter says, "can it not be about you for once?"

GABRIEL: Well, we don't really know, because we don't get to see their past. But I think there is the shock in the realization that while she feels she has given her life for her family, her family feels that she has done nothing but screw them up.

JILL: Right. When the reality is that she probably had very little to give. And in the movie, at this point in her life, her children are grown; she tries to mother them to the best of her abilities, but she doesn't know how and doesn't have resources to drawn on. So she has to build a psyche from scratch. And it's part of why she's susceptible to this young stud.

GABRIEL: Well, he's really symbolic, isn't he? He's a carpenter, for God's sake. He's burly, he's hairy, he's got this unkempt beard. He is a wild, untamed colt of a man...the Robert Bly vision of the fully sexualized male.

JILL: But I'm very glad that the filmmakers didn't make this character into a cartoon. He's got a great relationship with the child. He's not a penis on legs.

GABRIEL: He's smart, he's creative, he's creative, and he's frighteningly hot. He is all of these things that she is responding to. The other side of this portrayal of young virility, however...is that this movie portrays old age as a fate worse than death. It seems like growing old is absolute hell.

JILL: Yes. At the same time THE MOTHER is trying to break cinematic taboos with portrayals of sex and women and older women -- Anne Reid is very, very brave.

GABRIEL: But her marriage at the beginning of the film is essentially an exercise in caretaking. And after having really amazing, Last Tango in Paris sex with Daniel Craig, she is paired up with a suitor more age-appropriate...and the sex they have seems miserable.

JILL: It doesn't just seem miserable, it is miserable. It's a cartoonish idea that nobody before their 60's knows how to do it. The older guy is this movie is pretty inept.

GABRIEL: But in a movie that is arguing that we should see past age, and past the boundaries that we set up for ourselves in life (and in later life), I was disturbed by the idea that being old is miserable over and over and over. She talks about getting older, hating it...

JILL: For women of that generation, the idea of older age being "freedom" is terrifying. It's very easy for them to just become paralyzed. Here in THE MOTHER, this is a catalyst -- what she has to go through to transition from her old life into a new one.

GABRIEL: It's really a tribute to Kureishi, because we're talking about this in broad strokes, but the film is much more fine and detailed about these issues.

JILL: It's like peeling an onion, by layer by layer by layer. He lets you get to know these people very slowly, the way you would in real life.

GABRIEL: Right.

JILL: It would take you a while to see all of this stuff going on.

GABRIEL: It is so gently revealed that when she 'accidentally' kisses him, there were gasps in the audience today. And this is an audience who has read the program blurb, and knew where the movie was headed. It's still shocking. People were not expecting it. It's told so beautifully, with crisp dialogue; Kureishi just doesn't write like other writers. I thought of that moment in My Beautiful Launderette when the two guys sneak around the corner and kiss, and everyone in the movie theatre goes "What!"

JILL: It's because his people are very, very real. Not archetypes, but there's enough in the characters that every family knows what it is about.

GABRIEL: In a perfect world, Anne Reid gets nominated for an Oscar. It won't happen, though.

JILL: It won't happen. It's coming out too early in the year.

GABRIEL: Don't you think she's amazing, though?

JILL: This is a really, really brave performance. Nobody else but maybe Helen Mirren would have done this movie.

GABRIEL: It requires someone who has a real.... proletariat...style. I mean, Helen Mirren always seems like aristocracy to me.

JILL: It also has to be someone that we don't remember as a young woman. Also, by the end of the film, you're rooting for her. She's done this terrible thing...

GABRIEL: Well, everybody here has an imperfect moral sensibility. I see it that she's got to reach out to somebody, and he's the one who happens to be standing there. She's frighteningly lonely.

JILL: And he fills that void. As I said, she doesn't really see that, his role in her life as a catalyst.

GABRIEL: Whenever you're dealing with sex as a dramatic element...I kept thinking of The Graduate, where the sex was always in service to the narrative. And here in THE MOTHER, we're always moving towards the narrative. I mean, you brought up Young Adam...it has a ponderousness over those elements that this film does not. Can I change subjects quick?

JILL: Sure.

GABRIEL: The cinematographer, Alwin Kutchler, is brilliant.

JILL: Yeah!

GABRIEL: He shot Morvern Callar, a movie I just hated hated hated. But here...it's so classically composed and sharp, and almost painterly.

JILL: There's a scene that sticks out in my mind, towards the end, where the son is drinking out of a bottle on a red sofa, against a blue wall. It looks like an Edward Hopper painting. It's beautifully composed. We're accustomed to seeing filmmakers do things with dim light and candlelight -- we talked about this with Young Adam, and also with that Girl With A Pearl Earring look -- as beautiful as that look is. Here it's different but just as affecting, compositionally. I mean, there's that scene with the carrot peeling -- which caused you to burst into hysterics --

GABRIEL: We both did. I'm not sure anyone else laughed. We did, because we're perverts.

JILL: No, it's because we see too many movies. We know about Foreshadowing 101.

GABRIEL: All right, let's wrap it up.

JILL: THE MOTHER is a beautifully made, beautifully constructed, beautifully acted film. It's going to make audiences profoundly uncomfortable, and will be talked about a great deal. And if there is God, Anne Reid will get an Academy Award nomination.

GABRIEL: I'm holding my breath.