How would you feel about Vivi if she were your mom?

This movie hit very close to home for me.

My mom is a former beauty queen with a considerable amount of charm. She's also had severe bouts of depression, some troubles with alcohol, and even a couple of nervous breakdowns.

As a mother, she was very caring and sympathetic with us - as long as she wasn't hysterical and/or drinking.

As a wife, she was much more consistent. Consistently distant, consistently judgemental, and consistently mad at nothing and everything for decades at a time at my dad - whose only flaw has been his unlimited patience. Well, not quite unlimited. He finally divorced her last summer after 47 years. The final straw was when he discovered my mom had a secret boyfriend - apparantly the third that he's known about.

Like Vivi, my mom could be genuinely wonderful. And like Vivi, she could be a nightmare.

Sometimes I think the reason this movie received a mixed response is because it doesn't give us a spoon-fed resolution for how we are supposed to feel about Vivi. I could see a lot of people scratching their heads and thinking 'Okay, so she had a nervous breakdown. Does that really excuse the way she treated her children and husband?'

The answer is no, but I don't really think the revelation that she had a breakdown was meant to excuse her behavior either. It was meant to illustrate that there were many aspects of her behavior, and that it's possible to love someone and still hate some of the things they've done.