First Take: About mothers & sons, and awkward reunions

Mexico doesn’t have a dense filmmaking history. But from their meager output masterpieces keep trickling in our range of vision. I happened to watch Fernanda Veladez’s Identifying Features by chance, and it turned out to be chance definitely worth taking!

Prying open wounds that never heal this is the story of a mother’s search for her son….On a very basic level it is the world occupied by Govind Nihalani’s Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa. But then, there are mothers. And then there are the others. Identifying Features occupies a world far beyond the immediate where we see the spectacular actress Mercedes Hernández as Magdalena claiming her right to find her missing child, cutting through apathy, red-tapism and crime cartels the way Jaya Bachchan did in Hazaar Chaurasi.., except that Jaya’s son was ascertained to be dead.

Magdalena’s son is declared missing. This could mean anything, from death to injury to voluntary hiding….This fearless film ticks off all the boxes in the doleful pursuit of a young man who crossed from his home in Mexico in pursuit of a better life. Like Magdalena’s son, thousands go missing every year while trying to illegally the border from Mexico into the US.

Like Miguel (David Illescas) some try to cross back and get killed. The film builds an unspoken terror at the US-Mexican border where drug cartels rule, young people are recruited as drug dealers or bumped off. The militia is in a manic mode.

The film moves in two opposite directions with its two main characters—a mother searching for her son and a son returning home to his mother …until the two characters’ lives intersect in a highly dramatic flow of adrenalized emotions. Without losing her rapidly flowing masculine touch, the director gives us a bleak and dangerous world populated by sinister shadows and a palpable danger to human life.

This is director Fernanda Valadez’s first feature film. She delivers a knockout blow with a film that is not afraid of silences and pauses. Madelena’s search for her son is not cleaned out or prettified for the sake of a wider acceptance by the audience. The characters whom the desperate mother (never showing, only feeling the serious desperation) meets in her search are so real, they seem unaware that they are part of a film. Secrets are exchanged, irregularities are exposed as the mother pursues her son’s shadowy trail through a gauntlet of imposive violence.

Several times while I became one with Magdalena’s pursuit, I forgot I was watching a feature film and not a documentary. Towards the end when Magdalena meets Miguel a gentle undulating mood takes over as mother and someone else’s son bond like a real mother-son with the unholy ghost hovering over their sad kinship.

This part of the film is excessively sentimental. It stands out like a sore thumb.

The ending is woefully defeatist and revved up with unnecessary hysteria, leaving the grieving mother with not a shred of hope. We know life’s like that. But cinema is not only about holding up a mirror to societal maladies, It is also about hope.

At the end of Identifying Features, we see fire and destruction everywhere, as though the angry Gods are reining poison on humanity. Although Identifying Features ends on a desperately unhappy note it never gives into the despair that the mother so effectively feels. The mood is not depressing although the mother seldom has a smile to spare. The happiness is gone for good. Hope is not.

A deeply stirring Irish film that no aficionado of slow-burn intense dramas should miss, Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s God’s Creatures is not an easy film to penetrate. It takes its own ‘sweat’ time to build up the drama.

And even then, the payoff is at best ambivalent.

Set in a coastal Irish town where everyone knows each other, it starts with Brian, the prodigal son who had left suddenly for Australia, returning to his home just as suddenly.

Trust veteran English actress Emily Watson to convey all the churning emotions of a mother who had all but given up hope. As her son Brian (Paul Pescal) had always been trouble,does Aileen even want him back?

The lack of external turmoil in the drama may be mistaken for sluggishness here. But please don’t make that mistake. There is an ocean of turbulence under that tranquil surface in God’s Creatures. As one by one, the mother’s dormant anxieties about her son’s true nature are laid open, this film raises several pertinent questions on the wages of parenting.

Should a mother not refuse to turn a blind eye to her son’s trespasses? I remember a film directed by Mohan Kumar in the 1980s Amba where the magnificent Shabana Azmi played a mother who must set aside her own maternal instincts to expose the truth about her guilty son. Nothing that dramatic happens in God’s Creatures….actually,it does. But (spoiler ahead) the shocking Mother India finale is done with such quiet anguish, it is like a slap in the face of all maternal indulgence.

Irish cinema has great actors. Emily Watson is not one of them. She is not Irish. But she is a great actress. Great British actress. Her Irish accent is so beautiful she blends with the rest of the cast like water reaching to the shores. Her rapport with her estranged daughter-in-law Sarah (played by the hauntingly beautiful Aisling Franciosi who is heard singing like an angel) is vital to the way the story moves forward, albeit at a deliberately languorous pace.

There is an unhurried quality to the narration. Which is not self-indulgence, but something else. The slow-burn intensity of the unravelling plot will outwardly suggest a slightness in the drama which is actually an erroneous reading of a film that never lets its characters off the hook.

There are no big revelations in the plot. Sarah doesn’t come forward to confront her mother-in-law with an I-told-you-so smirk. But they do have a wonderful sequence of shared womanhood towards the end. In this case, being right is not a cause for celebration. It only deepens the tragedy that washes these desolate characters’ lives like the waves beating against the shores of the isolated nondescript town where nothing is supposed to happen. Yet it does.

Vibeke Muasya’s Rushed is near a masterpiece. Put yourself in this mother’s shoes. There she is, waiting for her fresher son’s phone call all night staring at her phone in bed. When the son’s name finally flashes it is an attendant from an ambulance informing her that her beloved son has gone into a coma.

This heartbreaking moment will haunt you forever, as will the mother’s determination to get justice for her son. Siobhan Fallon Hogan as the mother Barbara O’Brien is every grieving parent in the universe rolled into one. She is furious and defeated, determined and anxious to bury her son in peace.

The first 30 minutes of the film are poignant and powerful without resorting to maudlin moments to wean our sympathy. Director Vibeke Muasya knows the situation needs no punctuations…not even a full stop when the film ends. The story of bereavement after a beloved son is killed during ‘hazing’ (ragging) is so violently tragic, it requires no embellishment.

Stand-up comedian actress Siobhan Fallon Hogan plays the mother with a gut-wrenching grit, rarely allowing the character to resort to tears. Hogan’s determination to get justice for her son is so intense and uni-focussed it just gets us all fired up. The way she takes off in her car with some clothes thrown into a washing basket, with no member of family not even her husband ( the quietly effective Robert Patrick) trying to stop her, shows that this mother means business. Always has.

Sadly, after a brilliant start, the plot loses the plot, if you know what I mean. Too many repetitive scenes of grieving mothers, too many indifferent politicians, too many dead ends. And the narrative’s final act where Barbara confronts her son’s tormentor (Jake Weary) one-to-one is so steeped in vigilantism, it feels like another far less real universe than the one that we saw Barbara occupy before she become a gun-toting Mata Hari. Jai Mata Di!

Nonetheless, there is enough in Rushed to make it a far-from-ordinary experience. The mother’s grief, at least initially, was so palpable it hit me like a whiplash.

Cinema all over the world is turning to repair rather than despair. Films about healing and kindness are much in vogue. And thank God for that! Director Hikari’s Japanese gem 37 Seconds about a cerebral palsy-stricken wheel-chaired strong-willed animation artiste’s journey from dependency to freedom, is so filled with humanism and compassion that it could easily have become a flouncy syrupy celebration of schmaltz. 37 Seconds (the title refers to the time that the heroine stopped breathing when she was born) is something far more vital than a mere motivational emotion picture. It is so stripped of preaching that it effortlessly ends up giving us lessons in hope at a time when the world is filled with utter despair. When we first meet Yuma (Mei Kayama) she is wheeling her way home to her mother’s fortress-like protectiveness. It’s the only way a girl destined to disability can survive….or is it? This delicately drawn sketch of life seen from ground level is so filled with surprises and with such warmth and humour that the theme of self-discovery acquires dilating tantalizing dimensions never seen in films about physically-mentally challenged heroes. It is refreshing to see the writer-director draw conscious attention to Yuma’s body. By doing so, the film reminds us that the physically disabled have normal carnal cravings. In Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black the sexually famished disabled girl (played by Rani Mukerjee) asks her ageing tutor (Amitabh Bachchan) to kiss her as she has never experienced any sexual gratification. In 37 Seconds, Yuma buys the services of kind warm-hearted gigolo who tries to fulfil her need with gratifying empathy. The sequence is at once acutely poignant and pointedly funny. There is a sexual unabashedness about the film I’ve never seen before. Yuma is seen naked more than once. Just because she can’t walk doesn’t mean her libido can’t think. Yuma, the wonder woman on a wheelchair wants the sex so she could be more experienced as a writer. Her propulsive catalyst is a ebullient unrepentant surprisingly sophisticated sex worker Mai (Makiko Watanabe) who exudes an easy grace and an boundless generosity. I am surprised at how much kindness Yuma encounters in her journey into self-awakening. In real life, it is not so easy for a disabled to find kindness let alone compassion. Writer-director Hikari purports to throw open the doors and windows of our hearts with an overwhelming idealism that never gets oppressive, even when Yuma meets her Prince Charming Toshiya (Shunsuke Daito) who wheels her around, almost to the end of the world. Yes, they sleep together. But they have no sex. The film’s build-up towards Yuma’s a full flowering is achieved through scenes that are constructed with care and affection. In one stormy confrontation sequence with her harried but ever-smiling mother(played by the brilliant Musuzu Kanno) Yuma accuses the mother of using her daughter’s disability to imprison her emotionally. It is a devastating moment of confrontational ugliness in a film wholeheartedly devoted to selling hope in a supermarket of despondency. 37 Seconds has a multiplicity of brilliant sequences which you will find discussing with friends for a very long time. It questions every normally-abled person’s responsibility.

Finally the late much-missed Rituparno Ghosh and Deepti Naval in a mother-son bereavement drama in Bengali that hardly anyone has seen. Bereavement and memories are a great high for celluloid drama. Some of the most poignant and memorable films of our times have tapped into the wounds of grief for creative juices and emerged trumps at the box office. Think of Meena Kumari mourning for her impotent marriage in Guru Dutt’s Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, or Supriya Choudhury’s smothered screams of protest for her wasted life in Ritwick Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara, or more recently, Nicole Kidman blaming the world around her for remaining normal while her own universe falls apart after her child’s death in The Rabbit Hole.

Strangely it is women who render themselves effectively to the cinema of loss and bereavement. Don’t men suffer when they lose someone precious? In a subtle sly way debutant director, Sanjay Nag’s Memories In March poses this question on gender attitude towards loss and tragedy.

In a script tenderly and delicately crafted by Rituparno Ghosh, director Sanjay Nag has a woman and a younger man locked together in the chamber of shared grief.

Memory and its deeply-reflective recollection after death are a recurrent leitmotifs in Rituparno Ghosh’s films. In Ghosh’s Sob Charitra Kalpunik Bipasha Basu got to know and fell in love with her husband Prosenjeet after his death. In Memories In March which Ghosh has scripted, the mother discovers the dark side of her son whom she thought she was very close to after his death, quite like Jaya Bachchan in Govind Nihalani’s Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa, though the thematic ramifications of Memories In March are emotional rather than political.

Aarti Mishra (Deepti Naval) a no-nonsense divorcee and mother from Delhi arrives in Kolkata after her only son’s sudden death in a car accident, to close the account of her son’s life and pick up the son’s remnants that would, perhaps, serve to sustain her for the rest of her life. In Kolkata, the land of Satyajit Ray, Ritwick Ghatak and Rabindranath Tagore (not necessarily in that order) Aarti meets a gentle middle-aged man Arnab (Rituparno Ghosh) who turns out to be a close friend of her son much closer than she, the mother, would have liked them to be.

The sequence on a steep staircase where the mother is told by her dead son’s affable colleague (Raima Sen, as coolly and casually competent as always) that her son was in a gay relationship with Arnab, is expertly executed to eschew tears while milking the situation for its insinuated poignancy.

Memories In March is excellent at building individual moments of crisis and catharsis between characters during a time that’s stressful beyond imagination for all concerned. However, the sum-total of the moments does not quite add up to that tremendous eruption of emotions that one would accept in a film about a mother’s journey into her dead son’s secret life.

Often the narrative holds back emotions, more to appear European in spirit than to be in character with the script. As played by Deepti Naval the mother is a portrait of restraint, breaking down just once when no one is looking in an open refrigerator (a tribute to Vijay Anand’s Tere Mere Sapne where Hema Malini did a similar breakdown sequence) and that too with such furtive fury, you wonder if she’s holding back the tears for a time when the camera doesn’t pry. The narrative’s structure and its journey from crisis to reconciliation is so tentative you wonder if this moving portrait of a mother coming-to-terms with her son’s death and dark secret about his sexuality doesn’t lose out on something vital in its effort to imbue a cosmopolitan hue to the emotions.

Having said this, the detailing of the emotions and the nuances inherent in the ambience cannot be faulted. The film creates a scintillating synthesis of suburban sounds and the intangible sound of hearts shattered by unforeseen tragedy. Incidental sounds, such as children running down the stairs of the dead son’s apartment block, or the old-fashioned rickety lift creaking to a start at a decisive moment in the plot, lend a workaday grace to the poignant proceedings.

The time passages seem cramped uneven and, lamentably, unconvincing. The narrative crams in the mother’s bereavement, acceptance of her son’s homosexuality and her bonding with his gay lover (albeit, done in endearing shades) in a fashionably condensed one-brief-moment-of-grief weekend. Again, a European affectation.

The cinematography (Soumik Haldar) and music (Debojyoti Mishra) invite attention to themselves slightly more insistently than the characters who remain suspended in muted melancholy. At times you wish to push the proceedings to a higher octave, if for no other reason then to see if these internally-suffering characters can express their pain more forcefully.

Memories In March is a ball of impenetrable anguish that implodes once in while. When it does the little shards of pain and hurt pierce your soul. The bond between two unlikely mourners who become one in their collective grief remains with you long after the last shot of a fish tank lying bereft and a voice message unattended after an irreversible tragedy. This is a work of bridled pathos made remarkable by Deepti Naval and Rituparno Ghosh’s delicately-drawn performances. If you enjoy cinema that provides emotional catharsis (a rarity in Bollywood today), this one is for you.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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