Little Tantri, barely 10, tries desperately to connect with her twin brother Tantra, as his mind and body start giving away to a debilitating disease, and she feels him slipping away through her fingers – she dresses up and dances for him and with him, plays a pretend cockfight, prays for him, plants new paddy seeds for him, and constructs and imaginary world with him drawn from their everyday simple life, unwilling to let go, despite knowing of his impending death.
Kamila Andini’s deeply evocative and lyrical Indonesian film The Seen and Unseen underlined a recurrent theme that drove so many of the films at the Bengaluru International Film Festival - BIFFES 2018. Our desperation is at the heart of our existence, it drives our lives, our stories.
But what visceral forms it takes could be seen through the cinematic lenses of various countries and their cultures, and their attitude towards life. Yet, this desperation has a universal appeal and understanding. You want to egg these characters on, being consumed by “the implacable fires of human desperation” as Tennessee Williams aptly words it. You want to cheer them on with their mission, to reach where they want and get what they desire.
In the Slovenian film Ivan, you slowly warm up to Mara as she goes through the gamut of emotions after giving birth to an illegitimate child, Ivan – outright rejection, gradual acceptance, protecting him, wanting to kill him and herself, forcefully ripped apart from him, used by her lover, and wanting her child back because she doesn’t want him to go through the same hopeless life she did as a foster child. A mother’s desperation to have her child back, to give her child that elusive sense of family and normalcy. This motherly love for a child takes other terrifying shapes in April’s Daughter, a Mexican film that tells the story of 17-year-old Valeria who has a baby and whose mother April usurps everything in her life – including her baby and her boyfriend. The mother’s desperation to live her daughter’s life, be young again and the daughter’s desperation to find her missing baby and boyfriend take us through another plane - of a quagmire of messed-up relationships.
Georgian film Scary Mother followed Manana, a mother and homemaker with grown up kids who is desperate to write, give voice to her fantastic nightmares, and be published. Ridiculed by her family for writing an erotic fantasy, branded as pornography, she escapes into a world all her own, with the support of a bookstore owner, physically and mentally, to find the elusive ending to her maiden book.
Desperate to kill herself, depressed and jobless widow Jelena tries to tie all loose ends, including placing an order for her tombstone, ensuring her insurance money will go to her young pregnant daughter, or just tidying up her house in this Serbian film Requiem for Mrs. J. Between her abject poverty, depression, and her need to end it all, you sink low into the grey depths of life’s desperation with Jelena.
Brazilian film Just Like Our Parents could have been set in today’s India, as you see protagonist Rosa trying desperately to prove to her mother that her work is as important as her husband’s. She is balancing an impossibly demanding life, trying to write a play and a bathroom fitting brochure at the same time, juggling the care of her children and being breadwinner, while the anthropologist husband is always away. She is caring for her estranged father, discovering he is not her real father, coming to terms with her mom’s cancer diagnosis, on the cusp of an affair with another parent in school, and realising her marriage isn’t working. And in between all this trying desperately to discover who she is and what her identity is! Phew!
Biffes 2018 definitely would have had several more films with this underlying theme that others may have seen through a different lens. What makes these films work for us is perhaps they suck us into the whirlpool of the life of their characters, and remind us as we go swirling in, that somewhere our lives are not too far removed from theirs, and we will, eventually, bob back to the surface.