Learning of love

My Mirror column:

From Francois Truffaut’s Les Mistons to Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor, what propels so many writers and filmmakers to turn the child’s gaze upon adults in the throes of desire?

“Jouve’s sister was unbearably beautiful,” begins the voiceover of François Truffaut’s Les Mistons (The Brats), as Bernadette Lafont cycles through the historic streets of De Nimes – her slim, leggy frame suspended effortlessly over her bicycle, her skirt billowing in the breeze, such a vision of lightness that she seems barely to touch the ground. What we watch is five boys watching this young woman. The eponymous “brats” of the film’s title follow Bernadette everywhere, first with their eyes and then by actually stalking her, alone or with her lover Gerard.

 

Truffaut, a film critic who had made his first short Une Visite in 1954, thought of Les Mistons (1957) as his “first real film”. Certainly, it already contains many themes he would continue to explore over his cinematic career – women as objects of desire that seem to mystify men, a certain realist poetry of everyday life, the unexpected rupture presented by death. What interests me most, though, is the theme of adult behaviour – in particular, sexual passion or what Truffaut's narrator calls amour – as seen through the eyes of children. The boys in the film are arrested by this young woman’s beauty, transfixed by the stirrings of a desire they do not even understand, and irritated by the fact of the lovers without quite knowing why.
 
When she leaves her bicycle to swim in a shaded grove, they gather round to sniff it like little puppies, one of them even delivering a slow-motion kiss on the seat where her posterior has recently rested. Categorised only as “unbearable”, the one-sided attraction they feel mutates into something else: “Too young to love Bernadette, we decided to hate and torment her.”

 

The child on the cusp of adolescence becoming smitten for the first time has been the subject of many books and films over the years. In LP Hartley’s 1953 classic The Go-Between, which Joseph Losey made into a famous 1971 film starring Julie Christie, the young narrator Leo recalls the shaping summer of his childhood in which he first felt attraction. “My sister is very beautiful,” his friend Marcus tells him one day, and after that, “for a time my idea of [Marian] as a person was confused and even eclipsed by the abstract idea of beauty that she represented.” Once Leo helps Marian dry her hair, and Hartley describes the immersiveness of the experience evocatively: “I was the bathing suit on which her hair was spread: I was her drying hair, I was the wind that dried it.”

When Marian embarks on a secret, torrid, socially unsuitable affair with a local farmer called Ted Burgess, Leo finds himself turned into their messenger. The child enables the adult relationship. But jealous, torn between his desire to please Marian and his own inarticulate feeling for her, and childishly blind to what is really at stake, he is also the one that brings it to its tragic end.

 

The Go-Between, with its sun-kissed sexual innocence and stark coming of age, is likely to have been among the inspirations for Atonement, Ian McEwan’s wonderful novel, which was adapted into the Joe Wright film. Like Leo, the 13-year-old Briony is responsible for the betrayal that drives apart the two adults she is close to, based on her childish misunderstanding of a charged sexual moment she witnesses between the socially transgressive lovers.
 
Paresh Kamdar’s under-watched, atmospheric film Khargosh (2009) has a very similar story to The Go-Between. The child protagonist Bantu becomes a go-between for his older friend Avneesh, and slowly finds himself enraptured by the girl Avneesh is besotted with, whom the film nicknames Mrityu (Death).
 
More recently, we have had Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor, whose take on exploratory sexual urges is several shades darker, and perhaps more layered than any of these other films. For one, Haraamkhor contains two levels of watching and watchers. An adolescent schoolgirl (superbly played by Shweta Tripathi) in a dusty North Indian town becomes morbidly attracted to her maths tuition teacher (a scarily believable Nawazuddin Siddiqui) after she spies on him having sex with his wife. But the 15-year-old Sandhya has her own set of stalkers: two younger boys in the same tuition class, one of whom thinks he is in love with her. The film steers us between these different gazes, refusing to let us rest easy. One moment, we wait with baited breath with Sandhya in an abortion clinic – but then almost immediately find ourselves confronted by her childish exuberance as she licks an ice-cream and ribs her lover-teacher-exploiter about what he’s going to tell his wife. We begin by giggling as the two boys hatch plans for Sandhya to see Kamal naked, because if a man and a woman see each other naked, “toh unki shaadi pakki”. But as the film draws to its denouement, the dusty haze and windmills gather into a terrible, tragic downpour, childish naivete leading somehow inexorably into life-altering errors.

Perhaps, in the end, that is what makes the child’s-eye view so terrifying. Examined through the frank gazes of children, the lives of adults don’t seem that foolproof any more.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Dec 2019

Under the covers

My Mirror column:

A chilling new film called The Tale unravels one woman’s narrative of her sexual self, and may help us all grapple more honestly with our own.

‘‘We tell each other stories in order to live,” runs the famous line from the American essayist Joan Didion. The line appears early on in Jennifer Fox’s disturbing new autobiographical film, The Tale, when the central character, who is modelled on Fox and shares her name, says it to a classroom full of documentary film students. The film’s Jenny Fox (played by Laura Dern) is a 48-year-old filmmaker and professor of documentary, and, at one level, the sentence is just about her trying to get her students thinking about how they might think about narrative, how we all use stories to give our lives structure. At another level, the Didion quote cuts straight to the heart of what The Tale is about: how we remember things, or how we choose to forget.




In her 1979 book The White Album, in which the line first appeared, Didion carried on: “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” The Tale, which came out on US television in May and can be seen on streaming services in India, is about Fox’s adult re-examination of the narrative line she imposed upon her own childhood – or certain events in it.

48-year-old Jenny is on her way back home from shooting a documentary about women in India, when she starts to get distressed messages from her mother Nettie (Ellen Burstyn), who has just discovered and read a ‘story’ that Jenny wrote in school. That ‘story’, which Jenny’s writing teacher apparently accepted as a work of the 13-year-old girl’s highly-developed imagination, was about a sexual relationship she had had with a 40-year-old man, a running coach called Bill Ritter who was the lover of a Mrs G, Jenny’s adored riding instructor.



But what the film really wants to emphasise is that the ‘fiction’ lay less in Jenny telling her teacher that she had ‘made it up’, and more in her belief that what had happened to her was not sexual abuse but a “beautiful” experience: a love affair from which she had withdrawn, leaving the older Bill devastated. The Tale makes terrifying use of the power of cinema, to show us how we might deliberately, or subconsciously, misremember things “in order to live” – as when we watch Jenny’s first meeting with Mrs G and Bill, first played by an adolescent actress, and then (after her mother shows her a picture of how she actually looked at 13), by a much younger, chubbier actress.



One of the many subtexts in the film is the passage of time. We encounter it, of course, in the splicing together of the 13-year-old Jenny and the 48-year-old woman, each as stubborn as the other, with the older one trying somehow to defeat the anti-victimhood narrative that her younger self has cultivated for years. But we also encounter it in the adult Jenny’s repeated shrugging away of what happened as part of a time of sexual liberation: “It was the ’70s”. Mrs G and Bill’s extramarital relationship – and the fact that they confided in Jenny – made her feel special, not just because they were adults she admired, but because they were adults who seemingly rejected the social/sexual rules by which her own parents lived. “You see how miserable people look in their little nuclear units? Monogamy, marriage: it’s just killing people,” pronounces Bill to Jenny at one point.


The Tale might be interestingly read as the flipside of another film about a teenager in a sexual relationship with a much older man: Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenaged Girl (2015). While also based on a personal memoir of a real ’70s childhood – Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel set in 1976 San Francisco – The Diary could not be more different. The Diary’s 15-year-old Minnie (Bel Powley) embarks on a sexual affair with her mother’s 35-year-old boyfriend Monroe. But even at its messiest, the sex seems driven by Minnie’s wanting it. And herein lies the rub. Does Minnie misremember?



The Tale does not share Minnie’s or The Diary’s sense of sexual discovery. It is definitely a #MeToo film, in that its existence is enabled by this new moment of sexual politics, when women are finally letting themselves (and each other) speak of abusive, exploitative sexual encounters that have for years been couched as ‘normal’. Instead of The Diary’s joyful (if sometimes confused) sexual abandon, The Tale has the grim feeling of something still being grappled with: how the sexual repression narrative was flipped into a sexual liberation narrative, without women asking enough questions about whose freedoms were actually enabled, and what sorts of things could pass under the radar. As we are finding in India, in our own #MeToo moment, there is no shortage of ‘liberated’ men ‘teaching’ younger women to be free.



It is up to us all to ensure that the sexual freedom we so absolutely need doesn’t end up working, undercover, as yet another form of sexual oppression.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 June 2018.

Adult Beginners

My Mirror column:

Two beautifully crafted European films – Summer 1993 and A Ciambra – offer delicate but substantive insights into how childhood flows into adulthood.

The six-year-old protagonist of Carla Simón’s affecting, unusual debut Summer 1993 has a ‘baby’, a doll she is often seen holding in the early scenes. Later, we see a statue of the Virgin Mary in an alcove, holding Jesus in exactly the same way as Frida cradles her doll.

Obviously, that’s not true. It’s the other way around.

Watching Summer 1993 alongside Jonas Carpignano’s superb second feature A Ciambra, both beautifully crafted recent films from Europe, I found myself thinking about children and how they learn to become adults. All learning begins, at the most fundamental level, with mimicry. So there is much to be learnt from observing children, and then working backwards to observe what they observe – and eventually absorb – from adults around them.

Summer 1993 is about an orphaned child’s first summer without her mother. That summary probably seems maudlin, and the film does make Frida’s disorientation and bewilderment palpable. But Simón draws on her own memories to produce a cinematic experience that’s tender, delicate and radiant with detail – never sentimental.

The figure of the absent mother is everywhere – in the crook of Frida’s doll-cradling arm, but also in Frida’s playacting games with her baby cousin Anna, where Anna is the ‘child’ to Frida’s ‘mummy’. The signifiers of adulthood are both hilariously general and heartbreakingly specific: Frida paints her cheeks with lipstick and puts on sunglasses, but she also lies about on a sofa and refuses to play with ‘her daughter’ Anna because she feels “sore all over”.

One of the ways Simón makes sure that the film does not become a one dimensional portrait of victimhood is to go beyond the ‘poor child’ tenor adopted by Frida’s well-meaning, affectionate but perhaps misguided grandparents. While the camera takes the child’s eye view of much that is vivid or baffling to Frida about the adult world – a firework-fuelled Barcelona neighbourhood as it grows more distant from a car window, a chicken being chopped – it does not shy away from Frida’s attention-seeking, sometimes at the cost of Anna. A child not brought up to watch out for a younger one can swiftly become a danger to her. Because if Frida takes her cues from the adults, then Anna takes at least some of her cues from Frida – and as Frida shows off her semblance of adultness, she deliberately lets Anna compete at things she has no chance of achieving.


The atmospheric, wonderfully acted A Ciambra is also about a child thrown in at the deep end. Carpignano’s young Roma protagonist Pio (Pio Amato, one of an exceptional cast of non-actors) finds himself handling a family crisis when his elder brother is thrown into jail. At fourteen, Pio is of course much older than Anna – on the cusp of adulthood. But what Carpignano does masterfully is to show how complicated it is to be on that cusp: young enough to be ordered around at home by his harried grandmother, and to want to hide his face in her lap – but also, in his own head, old enough to slip out of his house at night to conduct solo deals.

Much of the film’s visual shock value – and later its most heart-wrenching moments – derive their power from the fact that Pio still looks like a child, even as he smokes and drinks and generally tries his hardest to act like a man. Carpignano is clearly deeply invested in his very particular setting – a real-life Roma family living off petty illegalities on the outskirts of Gioia Tauro, a small southern Italian port city known for drug deals and organised crime – and he immerses us in it powerfully enough to see how hard it is for its inhabitants to imagine a world beyond it. There are other communities in this world, but their otherness is evoked right from the raucous opening family dinner scene, where someone says “We’re eating like the Italians” and later someone else: “You’re drunk like the Africans”. Here, too, the succession from adults to children, of how an approach to the world gets passed down through generations, is key. In one astutely underplayed scene, Pio’s ancient grandfather says to him about a cart lying in the garage: “I was born in that thing.” And then, “We were always on the road. Answerable to no one. It was us against the world. Remember. Against the world.”

The grandfather dies soon after, and the death brings the family’s men out of jail faster than originally slotted. It also puts paid to Pio’s fumbling, half-understood attempt at forging solidarities outside the community he was born into. In what is perhaps the only rupturing of the film’s observational realist style, a dreamlike silver horse that appeared in an early scene featuring the youthful grandfather appears to Pio – a symbolic vision of escape that might now forever stay a dream.

Perhaps that, in the end, is the difference between acting grown-up and actually becoming grown-up: adulthood makes sure you know that a dream is only a dream.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 April 2018.