My Mirror column:
At this year’s International Film Festival of India (IFFI), the desire for children emerged as a preoccupying theme for directors from China to Turkey
In Kantemir Balagov’s memorable second feature Beanpole (2019), which won the Un Certain Regard Best Director Award and the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Film in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, a young woman called Iya undertakes motherhood as a favour for her friend. It is the half-starved world of post-war Leningrad, and the friend, Masha, has had and lost a child. She has also had so many abortions that she can no longer get pregnant.
For a while, Masha seems unable to grasp this fact, leading her to seek out sex in the vain hope that a man might yet successfully impregnate her. “I want to have another human being inside me,” she tells Iya. Finally, giving up on that possibility, she persuades Iya to subject herself to sex with a man and carry the child to full term on her behalf.
The man that Iya requests to be her biological aid in this pursuit wants to know why she so badly wants to have a baby. “I want to be the master of her,” says Iya, talking of Masha. Having a baby may seem purely functional here, not something that Iya is invested in, except as a route to preserving her relationship with another woman. Yet, when she discovers she is not actually pregnant, the words Iya uses have an all-encompassing devastation. She is “empty”, she tells the doctor. Later she tells Masha that she feels “meaningless inside”. “There is no one inside me,” she continues.
The expressions I quote are the English subtitles, translated from the film’s original Russian dialogue. But that feeling of emptiness, the gnawing desire for a child, the all-consuming aspiration of motherhood, spanned across several films at this year’s edition of IFFI, which ended last Friday in Goa.
In Anthony Chen’s Singapore-set Wet Season, his much-awaited second feature after 2013’s Camera D'Or winner Ilo Ilo, a middle-aged teacher of middle school Mandarin is quietly distraught because she hasn’t conceived a child despite eight years of trying. Chen’s gentle, melancholy film is full of sharply observed moments that make her husband’s absentee status clear: her solo attempts to keep up with his side of the family and her increasingly lonely visits to the fertility clinic, where the extent of his potential contribution is frozen sperm – a perfect metaphor. When a newborn she is holding bursts into tears, a callous female relative is quick on the draw: “Why would she know? She hasn’t had one.” Between these draining medical and familial contexts, childlessness seems to have become the only relevant thing about her.
If Balagov took it into the past, director Gabriel Mascaro projects the desperation for a child into an imagined dystopic future, where a state-sponsored evangelical religiosity has made itself at home not just within the family, but within the sexual bond of coupledom. Divine Love is Mascaro’s vision of Brazil in 2027, where scanners on all public buildings reveal women’s pregnant status as they walk through the doors. Mascaro’s narrative centres on a bureaucrat called Joana, who deeply enjoys her work as the first port of call for potentially divorcing couples, but whose own marital life is under great stress from her inability to conceive. When she does, the husband – whose first reaction to the pregnancy news is to yell “I did it!” – is devastated to find out that he might not actually be the child’s biological father.
That almost total preoccupation with the biological role emerges, in the Turkish slow-burn thriller Chronology, as a primary symptom of male insecurity and self-absorption. In the very first scene, a woman tells her husband that the doctor has finally said they can’t have a child. She seems terribly weighed down. But the husband’s only question is: “On whose account is it not working?” He can only express sympathy or consolation with his partner once he has established that the situation is somehow her fault. As the film progresses, we see that that is a pattern. Paternity, it seems, is only something to be displayed as proof of one’s masculinity – and the needle of suspicion can easily pierce right through a marriage.
Perhaps the saddest film about the loss of and desire for a child at this year’s IFFI was the magisterial Chinese film So Long, My Son, in which the lives of a childless couple are revealed as inextricably entwined with the history of the country. Wang Xiaoshuai’s three-hour drama uses a long-range view of one family to impugn the one-child policy, while telling a compelling story.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 Dec 2019.
At this year’s International Film Festival of India (IFFI), the desire for children emerged as a preoccupying theme for directors from China to Turkey
In Kantemir Balagov’s memorable second feature Beanpole (2019), which won the Un Certain Regard Best Director Award and the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Film in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, a young woman called Iya undertakes motherhood as a favour for her friend. It is the half-starved world of post-war Leningrad, and the friend, Masha, has had and lost a child. She has also had so many abortions that she can no longer get pregnant.
For a while, Masha seems unable to grasp this fact, leading her to seek out sex in the vain hope that a man might yet successfully impregnate her. “I want to have another human being inside me,” she tells Iya. Finally, giving up on that possibility, she persuades Iya to subject herself to sex with a man and carry the child to full term on her behalf.
The man that Iya requests to be her biological aid in this pursuit wants to know why she so badly wants to have a baby. “I want to be the master of her,” says Iya, talking of Masha. Having a baby may seem purely functional here, not something that Iya is invested in, except as a route to preserving her relationship with another woman. Yet, when she discovers she is not actually pregnant, the words Iya uses have an all-encompassing devastation. She is “empty”, she tells the doctor. Later she tells Masha that she feels “meaningless inside”. “There is no one inside me,” she continues.
The expressions I quote are the English subtitles, translated from the film’s original Russian dialogue. But that feeling of emptiness, the gnawing desire for a child, the all-consuming aspiration of motherhood, spanned across several films at this year’s edition of IFFI, which ended last Friday in Goa.
In Anthony Chen’s Singapore-set Wet Season, his much-awaited second feature after 2013’s Camera D'Or winner Ilo Ilo, a middle-aged teacher of middle school Mandarin is quietly distraught because she hasn’t conceived a child despite eight years of trying. Chen’s gentle, melancholy film is full of sharply observed moments that make her husband’s absentee status clear: her solo attempts to keep up with his side of the family and her increasingly lonely visits to the fertility clinic, where the extent of his potential contribution is frozen sperm – a perfect metaphor. When a newborn she is holding bursts into tears, a callous female relative is quick on the draw: “Why would she know? She hasn’t had one.” Between these draining medical and familial contexts, childlessness seems to have become the only relevant thing about her.
If Balagov took it into the past, director Gabriel Mascaro projects the desperation for a child into an imagined dystopic future, where a state-sponsored evangelical religiosity has made itself at home not just within the family, but within the sexual bond of coupledom. Divine Love is Mascaro’s vision of Brazil in 2027, where scanners on all public buildings reveal women’s pregnant status as they walk through the doors. Mascaro’s narrative centres on a bureaucrat called Joana, who deeply enjoys her work as the first port of call for potentially divorcing couples, but whose own marital life is under great stress from her inability to conceive. When she does, the husband – whose first reaction to the pregnancy news is to yell “I did it!” – is devastated to find out that he might not actually be the child’s biological father.
That almost total preoccupation with the biological role emerges, in the Turkish slow-burn thriller Chronology, as a primary symptom of male insecurity and self-absorption. In the very first scene, a woman tells her husband that the doctor has finally said they can’t have a child. She seems terribly weighed down. But the husband’s only question is: “On whose account is it not working?” He can only express sympathy or consolation with his partner once he has established that the situation is somehow her fault. As the film progresses, we see that that is a pattern. Paternity, it seems, is only something to be displayed as proof of one’s masculinity – and the needle of suspicion can easily pierce right through a marriage.
Perhaps the saddest film about the loss of and desire for a child at this year’s IFFI was the magisterial Chinese film So Long, My Son, in which the lives of a childless couple are revealed as inextricably entwined with the history of the country. Wang Xiaoshuai’s three-hour drama uses a long-range view of one family to impugn the one-child policy, while telling a compelling story.
In all these films, across time and
space, pregnancy emerges as a tragic contest at which people either win or lose. The
less control we have over our circumstances, it seems, the more we are willing
and able to blame ourselves.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 Dec 2019.
No comments:
Post a Comment