Le Grand Jete : A Provocative German Drama That Confronts Incest Taboo
Le Grand Jeté (2022), directed by Isabelle Stever, is a European art-house shocker. Marketed as a psychological drama centered on ambition, sacrifice, and identity. The movie gained notoriety for its taboo story-line involving a mother–son sexual relationship. The film pushes directly into the darkest intersections of desire, control, trauma, and power. This combination of European arthouse detachment and uncomfortable intimacy is why Le Grand Jeté has peaked academic interest and criticism.
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At its center is Nadja, an aging ballet dancer whose entire life has been structured around discipline and obsessive self-control. After years of estrangement, she reconnects with her teenage son Mario, now nearing adulthood. What begins as a strained attempt at reconnection spirals into an emotional and physical transgression. The film does not treat this as a romance or a shock gimmick. Instead, it examines how power, emotional deprivation, and identity collapse can distort a person’s impulses and erode moral boundaries.
Fame, Family and the Forbidden
When she visits her mother, she is reunited with her son. A son she let her mother raise so she could pursue her dreams of being a professional ballerina. She has recently returned from overseas, to continue the ballet traditions as a respected instructor in her hometown. Her son is a young adult, getting ready to start college. Nadia is probably in her mid to late 30s with a ticking biological clock, she wants to establish a relationship with him, just as he is ready to leave the nest.
The film takes a strange art-nouveau twist as we learn that the son Mario engages in extreme feats of physical endurance (like his mom). After his “show”, they go back to the home he still shares with her mother, his grandmother. There, le Grand Jete, truly begins as Nadja asks if she can touch, his prize winning, most endurant body. He is absolutely unreserved in his response, as she remains very much a stranger, a celebrity of sorts, more a curiosity than his mother.
The plot’s controversy is unavoidable. Many viewers have criticized the film for depicting incest directly rather than symbolically. However, Stever’s approach is intentionally clinical. The film avoids glamorization or erotic styling, favoring instead a cold, almost documentary-like lens. This aesthetic reinforces the idea that the horror of the situation comes not from sensationalism but from the characters’ emotional desolation.
From a cultural commentary perspective, the film exposes how society often romanticizes certain forms of control and self-sacrifice, especially in the world of ballet. Discipline becomes pathology. Perfection becomes obsession. Parental instinct becomes possession. Nadja’s relationship with dance, and by extension, with her own body, is as abusive as the dynamic she ultimately forces upon her son. The incest plot is not simply provocation. It is the logical culmination of a lifetime spent confusing worth with pain, intimacy with dominance, and control with love.
