Quote:
"For Catherine [in What My Mother Told Me], her ability to narrate the events from her past is constantly interrupted by the emotions that seize her during the telling; as such, the process of storytelling is very much one of emotional and psychic upheaval as well as one of eventual, uneasy resolution. The resolution between mother and daughter at the end of the film is hardly clear-cut; a few things are resolved but the intricacies of mother-daughter relations are complicated and the process of healing is a long one. Despite the integration of past events into present lived reality, both women nonetheless need to negotiate how they will now relate to each other in light of what they know about their respective and interconnected history."
-- Carmen Nge

Source:
Nge, Carmen. "The Return of the 'Native': Visualizing Place and Narrating Homecoming." PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2004. (p. 8)