First Take: Mothers & missing daughters

There is something about the writer-director duo Celine Held and Logan George’s Topside, which qualifies it as an instant classic. Something anguished urgent and very disturbing, something that is at once cinematic and documentary-like. Quite frequently the shaky camera movements seem to remind us that cinema is not about aesthetics but about capturing reality as closely as possible.

That’s what Topshot does as 5-year old Little and her mother flee from destitution to an imagined freedom that is never quite obtainable for people who live below the poverty line. Little and her mother Nikki (played with stunning physical and emotional currency by co-director Celina Held) live in an abandoned tunnel of New York.

Nikki is not fit to be a mother. But a mother is all that Nikki wants to be. Celine Held brings to her drug-addicted bruised battered exploited and insolvent role that kind of desperate urgency to escape that leaves no room for pity. Watching Nikki  trying to protect her  lovely bewildered daughter from the  hard sunlight and drugged predators on the  bustling uncaring streets  of  New York, I thought of  all the destitute people whom we pass by without even looking at them.

Where will Nikki go with her child? For more than 90 minutes, that question will haunt the  audience as the co-directors weave in and out a traffic of a terrifying jostle. Watching Nikki, all jumpy and stricken with anxiety, trying to find a place for her child to sleep for the night I was willy-nilly reminded of Chetan Anand’s Hindi film Aakhri Khat  (1966) in which a little boy looks for his mother in an uncaring city.

In Topside, the mother is with her child. But there is nothing she can do to protect it. The most heart-stopping moments in the storytelling occur when Nikki stumbles into a metro compartment; before her child can follow her inside the door closes. The horrific panic of the  mother as she  travels to the next station , runs down to another platform to catch the train back to where her daughter got left behind and where  hopefully the child will be found, has been captured in real time.

You can see this is exploitative suspense. Or as a petrifying manifestation of every mother’s  worst nightmare. I choose to go with the latter. Survival stories are largely swathed in the satin  of a fictional glow. Topside goes the other way. It assumes a ramrod urgency pounding into our belief that screen heroes, no matter how  mired in distress, will find their way to the  top of the crisis. This tormented mom knows she is fighting a losing a battle. Her final decision about her child’s future will shake and stun you, but it will also remind you that letting go is the highest level of love.

I was clean-bowled by Topside. Its jittery, dizzying camerawork (Lowell A. Meyer) may leave the audience feeling queasy. But this immersive drama doesn’t deserve a detached viewing. It sucks you right into its dilemma of homelessness, as the  bereft mother and daughter try to find one comforting corner in the city that they  can call their own for one night.

It’s not that Nikki and Little do not encounter kindness in the city. They do. It’s just that beyond a point, kindness is not enough for  survival.

The Justice Of Bunny King is a shatteringly potent look at insolvency. Not all the needy in the world, especially in this environment of post-lockdown financial crisis, want us to help them. Bunny King, played with disquieting rawness by  Australian actress Essie Davis, is desperately  destitute.  But I doubt she would accept my helping hand if I were to offer it. There is a pungent pride in Bunny’s attitude that won’t be compromised, no matter  how  low she  dips in the dredges of destiny. Essie Davis is so brutally honest in playing the characters she will make you wince  .

The Justice Of Bunny King, now streaming on Amazon, is one of those heroine-led dramas that  would probably fall apart without its central performance. The lead performance is the life and breath of this muted angry drama  of seeking to create  your own justice system in a world that constantly judges you  by the  sheen  of you  nail varnish and  the heels  of you shoes. Essie Davis is so basic in her portrayal, she persuades her co-actors to match. Some of them barely do. But no one lets down the central performance.

No one, except the screenwriter Sophie Henderson, who seeks a cinematic closure to  Bunny’s wretched predicament. I don’t think Bunny would approve of the wooden-horse heroism that  grips Bunny’s life in the last  40-45  minutes when she holes up in a social workers’ office. Very soon the empathetic social worker (Tanea Heke, struggling to keep her character’s overwhelming virtuosity above water) becomes  Bunny’s buddy in the game of  cat-and-mouse in this drama of the doomed and desperate.

 I would go as  far as to say that the film turns  lachrymose in its closing interlude. Perhaps  debutant director Gaysorn Thavat  was under  pressure to soften the blows that Bunny suffers. But  holding  up the Establishment to get her way is not something Bunny would do. She  is done  beating her head against the wall. Bunny  King is  a woman who has  stopped looking for answers for why life has laid  out lemons for her. She  is  done making lemonade. She  will  fight tooth and nail to get her mentally troubled little daughter out of the clutches of  social workers who judge her adversely in everything she  does. There is a parallel fight going on  in Bunny’s life where she needs to rescue her teenaged niece Tonya (Thomasin McKenzie) from those  closest to her. As though fighting her own battles is not  enough! Bunny King is that  kind of righteous  do-righter  who   has nothing to  lose. She  will go down fighting. But dammit, she  won’t hold up  a social worker to get her daughter over for a birthday  celebration. This is  not the Bunny King we know.

In Liz Garbus’ Lost Girls on Netflix, much of this true-life harrowing story  of a distraught mother’s search for a daughter who goes missing  in Long Island, feels like documented  evidence  dipped and dried in pools  of dehydrated melodrama. The  plot  as it uncovers  the  death of several  young women buried  in  the hushed upperclass  wealth of Long Island,  has the potential to knock our socks off. Tragically , as the  law enforcement lets the  mother down, this film too is not a really worthy look-see at a crime that shook America in 2010 when a young  woman Shannan  Gilbert disappeared.

The  cops’ antipathy apparently has to do with the missing girl being a sex worker. As a sardonic  cop says somewhere during the investigation that’s opened up by the persistent mother, “I’ve never seen  so much time being wasted on  a hooker’s murder.”

Right. Hookers are best buried and forgotten. This means, in principle, that a woman who is  not socially  ‘up there’  deserves less justice than  if a girl had disappeared  from a  normal  workingclass family. It is a shocking moral discrepancy and one that, I’m afraid, this film seems  incapable of shouldering let alone resolving. What we see is a mother’s  relentless search for her daughter and how her  other two daughter  specially the teenager Sherry (Thomasin Mackenzie who was so memorable as the Jewish girl in Jojo  Rabbit) come to terms with the  fact that their missing sister was earning her  bucks for ….well you you know the  word  that  rhymes with shucks.

While director Lis Garbus does a commendable job of throwing light on  an unpardonable crime cover-up, the treatment of the subject is often dry and pedantic. What could have been a haunting  experience for  viewers ends up as just  a reasonably stirring echo of a crime and reluctant  punishment that humanity must not forget. The  story deserved an epic treatment. All its gets is an emotionless sapped-out  drama where the tensions are entirely controlled by  the  principal actress Amy Ryan’s dramatic skills. Ms Ryan is just about adequate in bringing out the mother’s grief and determination. Admittedly it is not easy to feel any sympathy for a woman who lets her daughter earn though disrepute. No easy solution for life at the edges is provided in this drama of  blunt edges and sharp disappointments.

There is none.

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.

Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.