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Yared Zeleke’s first film, Lamb, about a young boy forced to leave his hometown with only his pet lamb for comfort, was the first Ethiopian film to screen in the Cannes Un Certain Regard competition.
[Read more…] about Remarkable Lamb marks Ethiopia’s Cannes debut
Of the three competition films I’ve seen thus far (Tale of Tales and Sea of Trees, I liked Our Little Sister best, a quiet, sweet, and heartbreaking film about three grown, co-habitating sisters, who meet their younger fourteen-year-old sister, Suzu (Suzu Hirose) after their absent father dies, and decide to take her in as one of their own. The tender scenes of female bonding are what’s likely to stand out to most people: these are smart, funny, and gutsy, open-hearted women, who love fully and easily. Their various adventures are charming, whether it’s making a feast, falling for boys, or struggling to not get too emotionally involved in their work.
But its chipper surface belies a darker underbelly, much like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It’s all in the eyes of the eldest, Sachi (Haruka Ayase), who instantly recognizes herself in Suzu, forced to grow up too soon, to be the adult for parents too immature to do so herself. As Suzu recounts stories of her childhood, Kore-eda shoots all of the sisters in one frame, showing us the the two middle sisters, Yoshiko (Masami Nagasawa) and Chika (Kaho), who listen with blissfully ignorant smiles, and a more serious Sachi who sees Suzu’s deeper pain.
There may be laughter and love between the sisters but some topics are taboo. The elephant in the room is that their father left the three sisters for Suzu’s mother, and Suzu feels that her presence alone must be a painful reminder to them. And when their father left, so, too, did their mother, leaving Sachi to pick up the slack. Sachi’s younger sisters think she’s too self-serious, unable to see that somebody needed to hold the family together and nobody was going to do it for Sachi. For a while, it’s only in moments with their friends and lovers that the women can be honest about how they feel about their relationship. But it’s through those friendships that they find a way to talk to each other, to share their pain, and find joy and comfort in one another from their shared history.
If you’re not watching closely, it would be easy to dismiss Our Little Sister as sentimental fluff, especially as there are a few too overtly sentimental statements toward the end. Stories of women coping with trauma, from The Hunger Games to Wild tend to get that treatment by default, but like the aforemented films, Our Little Sister has an unassuming wisdom beneath its winsome exterior. It’s raw and heartbreaking and real, and that’s commendable. Shooting the sisters all in one frame whenever possible, Kore-eda builds these women into a family onscreen, letting the space between them speak as much as their hugs and teasing. More lighthearted than I Wish, and with a touch of acknowledgment of the importance of blood ties that was the centre of Like Father, Like Son, this marks Kore-eda’s return to form.
This article has been edited to reflect the new English language title for the film, which is Our Little Sister. The article previously stated that the film’s title was Umimachi Diary, which is how it was referred to at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015.
Read more: Review: The politics of sisterhood in Mustang >>
Colm Toíbin’s novel Brooklyn was in many ways a perfect book, a taut and heartwrenching story of a young Irish woman, Eilis, and her traumatic experience immigrating to America in the 1950s: the way it left her in limbo, no longer comfortable in Ireland and always an outsider in her new home. John Crowley’s screen adaptation, written by the incomparable Nick Hornby, is even more emotionally resonant — if not as poetically constructed as Toíbin’s prose — in part because it’s a more modern, feminist take on the story. In the film, Eilis is less a victim of circumstance and more a self-possessed woman with agency, in control of her destiny. Yet this is still a faithful adaptation, and it surprised me how much the scenes and settings felt so vividly familiar, so completely like what I’d imagined in the novel.
The thing Crowley so beautifully understands is the way that moving to another country makes being at home a surreal experience: even before Eilis (Saorise Ronan) embarks on her journey to America, a plan devised and executed by her sister (Fiona Glascott), her life in Ireland already seems like a memory. When she attends one last town dance, after watching her friend go off to dance with a boy, Crowley holds on a closeup of Eilis’s face for at least a minute, her smile fading, already feeling distant, separate, lonely, and miles away. The mere act of preparing to leave has somehow made her so much older and wiser, even though she’s so naive and impressionable at the beginning of the film.
Although the actual week-long boat trip to America took up no more space in the book than it does in the film, it felt more grueling and horrific, as if Eilis were already broken before even arriving in America. It’s painful in the film, but it’s more matter-of-fact: she doesn’t know what she’s doing yet. It’s trying; she’s learning. But the film generally downplays the horrors of her immigration experience. We may see Eilis drenched in tears while in Brooklyn, alone in her room, homesick and longing for Ireland, but America is a land of opportunity for her, not just a place with a new set of rules and customs.
In Brooklyn, Eilis gets a job working at an upscale women’s clothing store, and the Irish priest at the local parish (Jim Broadbent) arranges for her to take night classes in book keeping: she’s a smart girl, and they all want more for her than a job in a shop. She also meets a lovely young Italian-American man, Tony (Emory Cohen), at one of the church dances, who dotes on her and brings her into his large and loving family.
In the film, Tony is big-hearted and warm, the reason that Eilis comes out of her depression and into herself. In the book, he was a more ambiguous figure: he was all of those things, but also manipulative and jealous, and not clearly a perfect match. Here, Eilis knows what she’s getting into — which is less risky to begin with — and walks in with eyes open: she keeps her control and agency, teasing Tony and displaying her smarts.
The film is more romantic because of Tony’s obvious goodness. On their first date, Tony, a plumber by trade, asks her about book keeping, and we watch him watching her in awe and admiration, as she explains in detail what she’s been learning in her night classes. Time passes as the sound of her voice fades, but Tony is still sitting there mesmerized by her words. When they go to the movies to see Singin’ in the Rain, we find Tony hugging a street lamp in the park that night, in homage to Gene Kelly’s famous dance number, a truly romantic figure. Canadian cinematographer Yves Bélanger (who also shot Wild, also adapted by Hornby) brings out the rich colours and soft light in their scenes together, making Tony — and by extension, America — seem filled with wonderful possibility.
Eilis lives in a boarding house with a group of other young Irish immigrant girls, reigned over by the matriarchal landlord (Julie Walters). Although the boarders don’t become fast friends, the frequent formal dinners shared in the house are a source of immense humour in the film — Walters steals the show so often and Hornby’s dialogue is sharp — as the girls snicker and gossip, and even occasionally support one another. It adds warmth to the film that I don’t recall from the book, making America a more inviting place, rather than somewhere that Eilis was simply sent without having a say in the matter. And Walters’s impeccable comic timing brings some much-needed comic relief to this often sad story.
Of course, Eilis will have to go home to Ireland at some point and deal with what moving away means and where she now belongs. Tragic events bring her back, and she finds herself the centre of attention now that she has glamourous American travels under her belt. There’s her sister’s old job waiting for her while there was no work to be found before she left. There’s a sweet, decent, wealthy young man, Jim (Domnhall Gleeson), wooing her, and their shared culture makes their courtship easy. The way that she clings to him on the dance floor at a party one night, with such warmth, reminds us just how much Jim feels like home, even if it might be a home far away and long ago.
After everything Eilis has been through, can she stay in Ireland? It has a magnetic pull on her, between the people she loves and the landscape she knows. Or is her life in America better, or at least, what represents her future? The film has clear and easy answers here — although it does give what it considers the wrong choice a fighting chance — where the book was more tragic. In Toíbin’s novel, there were no right answers: displacement meant never fully belonging in either place. It makes Crowley’s film more triumphant and winning, but it does sacrifice some of the richness of Toíbin’s more realistic and tragic story.
That we’re right there with Eilis throughout her journey, rooting for her and feeling her every loss and pain, is a tribute to Ronan’s remarkable performance. Crowley wisely holds her in closeup for long takes, letting her take in news, respond to a situation, and bring us with her through her thought process, where conflicting emotions and priorities may be coming into play. It’s a sensitive and layered performance, and Crowley makes sure to give her the spotlight to shine and to show us how her character matures.
Ronan’s Eilis is also not just flattered that Tony is interested in her enough to go along with things: she sees his sweetness and timidity, his insecurities and worries. Cohen plays him with depth, always letting slip through what Tony tries so hard to hide, making Tony a healthy example of masculinity: theirs is a partnership of equals. It makes this a modern romance we can root for rather than a relic of the past, and it makes this thoughtful film an easy crowd-pleaser. I, for one, loved it.
Norwegian director Anne Sewitsky’s (Happy, Happy) wonderful new film, Homesick, screened at the Sundance Film Festival this week in the World Dramatic Competition. Starring Ine Marie Wilmann, who gives a terrific performance, the film follows a late 20-something children’s dance teacher, Charlotte, who, because she never received any real parental love, has become desperate, clingy, and self-destructive.
When she meets her half-brother for the first time, now that they’re both adults in their late 20s, they strike up a romantic relationship, in part because they’re the only two people who truly understand each other’s emotional trauma; they both had the same self-absorbed, absent mother.
The film is beautifully shot on location in Oslo, with many romantic images, inviting us to empathize with Charlotte always, and never judging her. After the World Premiere of the film, I sat down with Sewitsky and Wilmann to discuss their preparation for the film, the film’s aesthetic, and Charlotte’s loneliness.
The Seventh Row (7R): Ine, how did you prepare to play the role? Anne, what preparation goes into the shoot: storyboarding, location scouting, etc.?
Anne Sewitsky (AS): For this film, I wanted to have a very real feel to it, but also I wanted it to be beautiful. It was a mix of trying to find all the locations — we were shooting on location — but also finding very cinematic locations, and trying to make it a mix between a very rough look and a more beautiful look.
We spent a lot of time looking at images, paintings, and other films for inspiration. And then, we spent quite a lot of time preparing with a script and with the actors. We read through it several times, and we improvised and changed things. We shot long takes, like 10 minutes at a time — they got a little crazy.
Ine Marie Wilmann (IMW): During the very intimate scenes, we were working quite a long time. It was in the middle of the night, and she was like, “Yeah, we’re just going to do a short, different camera setting. Just a very short little piece of it.” And then we’d done what she’d said, and we sensed that the camera was still rolling, so we were like “OK, keep on acting.” She held it for like 10 minutes. When she said cut, we were like, “NEVER do that again!” That’s too long. And she was like, “Yes, but it was very nice.”
I got the part in May or June, and then we didn’t shoot the film until February. So I had plenty of time thinking about it. When they auditioned all the men, I acted again [and read with them] so then I got to try out a lot of the situations. We also talked about the situations so much. We would try it out, and then this just doesn’t feel right, or this feels a bit constructed. When we actually shot the film, I never thought about lines. I could just concentrate on the situation. It never felt like, “Stand there, say that line.” It just felt very organic. I felt very free.
AS: I thought she was so amazing. I’ve never said so little on the set. I was thinking, “I don’t have to touch this. Just let it play.”
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘I’ve never said so little on the set. I was thinking, ‘I don’t have to touch this.” – Sewitsky” quote=”‘I’ve never said so little on the set. I was thinking, ‘I don’t have to touch this.” – Sewitsky”]
7R: One of the things Ine mentioned was the way that you often found your character apart from other people, physically. Anne, how did you think about framing to create that detachment?
AS: We had some very planned pictures with her alone, and we knew that we would have some [shots] that were very close to her. We also had so much material. It was about following the characters. A lot of what you see has also been formed in the edit from many choices. For one scene, we had 30 pictures, and we used five. It was a very intense editing process, because I had so many choices to make, where I could do so many directions. Through the editing, that style became more and more clear — putting her more and more alone, like when she walks over the city, the hill, or walks through the town alone.
IMW: That was actually something new for me, when I saw the film. When I played the character, I was always trying to achieve something. But then, looking at it from the outside, when I saw the finished film, I almost hadn’t thought about how lonely she was. When I looked at it, I was like, “In the end, Oh my God, she’s just all alone.” So it was a more lonely journey than I thought when I acted it myself.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘When I saw the finished film, I almost hadn’t thought about how lonely she was..when I acted it.'” quote=”‘When I saw the finished film, I almost hadn’t thought about how lonely she was…when I acted it.'”]
AS: I think that was important, because it’s also about her desperation. You can’t necessarily play loneliness or self-pity. This can go melodramatic — it’s a very fine balance. I needed her [Ine] acting to always be on the upside, and then we could choose some few places where either the camera shows loneliness or she can have her outbursts.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘It was almost like you had me right on the edge of crying throughout the whole film.’ – Wilmann” quote=”‘It was almost like you had me right on the edge of crying throughout the whole film.’ – Ine Wilmann”]
7R: When you have scenes with other characters, there’s often so much restraint sometimes, just keeping these emotions in, but because there are closeups, we can see what’s going on. How do you develop that sort of restraint but still make sure that it’s clear what’s going on? What is the process?
IMW: I think you [Anne] have so many pictures of me almost crying. It was almost like you had me right on the edge throughout the whole film. Many of the scenes, we took a lot of emotion, and then just packed it up. As an actor, I like people trying to hide, because that’s what we do in real life. Even when she has this outburst in the toilet, after the scene with her mother, even then she tries to control her anxiety. She’s trying to stop crying. It’s very rare that you just give yourself over to the emotion. You’re often trying to hold back or struggle against it. That’s often what I find interesting to watch.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘It’s very rare that you just give yourself over to emotion. You’re often trying to hold back.'” quote=”‘It’s very rare that you just give yourself over to emotion. You’re often trying to hold back.'”]
AS: We went through the script and said, “How many times does this character cry?” This is a character that is imposing on other people, but we have to love her. If she’s going around crying the whole time, we’re going to get annoyed. So it was about getting attached to the character.
IMW: It was in a way easy to act, because all of the situations were very clear. You always had some mutual tension. We didn’t have to, like, go to the bathroom and pump it up before we came on, or try to force things. It was just natural in the situation.
[clickToTweet tweet=”She’s really bad at articulating her feelings, and her brother is, too. It’s emotionally immature.” quote=”She’s really bad at articulating her feelings, and her brother is, too. It’s emotionally immature.”]
7R: The romantic relationship with her half-brother, I wondered, at the end, if one of the reasons for that was to try to blow up her relationship with her boyfriend and to detach from that family. Is that something that you’re consciously thinking about when you’re doing those scenes?
AS: Not so consciously, but we knew that the character was self-destructive. In that way all the things that she was doing, she kind of consciously went into, eyes open. She knew that it was going to drive him away.
IMW: But it wasn’t like a conscious thought, because it’s better that the character isn’t that conscious about what choices that she does, to be more emotionally driven or to be more impulsive and destructive at the same time. If I were to focus on that thought, it would be too conscious, and I don’t think she is. The first time I read it, I was like, she’s really bad at articulating her feelings, and her brother is, too. That’s part of why it goes wrong, because it’s emotionally immature.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘We wanted it to be in a sensual film. We didn’t want it to be a hard, super-realistic film.'” quote=”We wanted it to be in a sensual film. We didn’t want it to be a hard, super-realistic film.”]
TSR: There are so many romantic images in the film, especially the wide two-shots. How did you approach creating those images?
AS: We wanted it to be in a sensual film. We didn’t want it to be a hard, super-realistic film. We wanted it to be in a dream world when they go up to the hotel in the swimming pool. We tried to find locations that gave that, and then just park the camera there, trying to find angles that are more like paintings. It was a mix: finding the realistic scenes and finding the painted scenes that are more art.
Norwegian filmmaker Anne Sewitsky’s Homesick is moving, funny, and devastating — and one of the best films at Sundance 2015. Homesick is now streaming on Netflix UK.
Click here to read our interview with Sewitsky and lead actress Ine Wilmann.
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Norwegian filmmaker Anne Sewitsky’s moving, funny, and devastating Homesick — one of the best films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival — opens in a psychiatrist’s office, where Charlotte (the terrific Ine Marie Wilmann) describes her mother as saying she wants to be there, but never really wanting to be there. She’s the kind of mother who, when Charlotte meets up with her, will immediately start bragging about her own achievements, never even bothering to ask after her daughter in any way.Charlotte has formed deep-rooted insecurities, leading to her pain and loneliness, which make her desperate and self-destructive. This film has the melancholic atmosphere of Oslo August, 31st, and likewise features joyous and romantic moments now and then. Homesick has the wit and buoyancy of Frances Ha. Anne Sewitsky’s Homesick may cover well-trodden Sundance ground of a woman learning to love herself. But Sewitsky shoots with such formal discipline that it’s stylistically in the same league as these two films. It’s a far cry from mumblecore.
When Homesick begins, Charlotte is feeling very insecure because her clingy relationship with her best friend Marte (Silje Storstein). Marte is marrying — and may be moving on. Charlotte is also dating Marte’s brother. Though he is a very nice guy, Charlotte seems to be using him mostly to gain entry into his family. Charlotte and Marte work at a dance studio together where Charlotte teaches children to dance. The opening credits happen over a witty and gorgeous sequence of the pair dancing and playing in the studio in soft light. At the end of each lesson, the whole class offer Charlotte warm hugs. Sewitsky suggests that Charlotte may be looking to her job to find affection and appreciation.
When her fully grown half-brother, Henrik (Simon J. Berger), walks into the studio to see where she works, her life starts to change — not only for the better. They’ve never met. Apparently, she’s been stalking him, and his visit is his way of returning the favour. She is very curious Henrik, as someone who has never really had a proper home. He’s got a lot of anger about their family. Charlotte grew up believing that her mother was never allowed to see Henrick, but discovers this was a lie. She is desperate for a family connection, and he’s hurting, too. Charlotte and Henrick eventually agree to meet.
She visits his house one night, where she meets his wife and children. Henrik’s wife suggests Henrik and Charlotte go out for a drink together. What follows seems more like a first date than a meeting of siblings. They walk and talk through the streets of Oslo — their own little Before Sunrise. When they end up at his place, sharing a bowl of cereal, they make eye contact. It lasts just a few beats too long. At the beginning of the night, they were in some kind of limbo between platonic bonding and romantic flirting. Both were happening, and both were blurred. But this stare, which Sewitsky holds in an uncut two-shot, suggests things may be taking a turn.
Although they don’t know each other, they share a similar trauma from being abandoned, in different ways, by the same woman, their mother, and that’s a powerful bond. In a way, they’re the only people that understand each other’s pain, because it is the same pain. He’s also convenient for Charlotte: gentle and loving while her musician boyfriend is away on tour, but married and ultimately unavailable. It’s both a bad choice and a safe choice.
Sewitsky gives us these beautiful, almost dream-like compositions of Henrik and Charlotte in two-shots, often set against an expansive landscape. But she also holds on their faces during intimate moments, and there’s conflicting emotions at all times: Charlotte wants this but she also doesn’t, because she knows what it means, because it’s shameful, because of what else it will destroy, and because he’s the married one, which gives him all the control in the relationship.
Even as the characters judge themselves constantly, Sewitsky never does: there’s a silence around the relationship between Henrik and Charlotte that tells us there are no happy endings. It’s not even because they’re biologically related, but they’re both emotionally stunted. He already has a home. She’s still trying to find one. It may also be a convenient way for her to destroy her already slowly disintegrating relationship with Marte who is more focussed on becoming a mother than on taking care of Charlotte.
But Charlotte doesn’t know what she wants, and Sewitsky has the confidence to hold on silent moments for longer than may be comfortable, when decisions are being made. There’s a long pause between when Henrik first passionately kisses Charlotte and when she decides to return the kiss. Charlotte also doesn’t want others to know just how lost she is, and there are so many scenes where Sewitzky holds on a tight, tight closeup of Charlotte, for minutes sometimes, as she tries desperately to rein in her tears and hide her pain and sadness.
Earlier this week, director Céline Sciamma told me, and I’m paraphrasing here, that cinema is the only art form in which we can share another person’s loneliness. Like Oslo, August 31st, Homesick is incredibly effective in not just showing us Charlotte’s isolation but making us feel it, too — whether because she’s physically distant from the other characters in a scene or having emotions that she can’t let others see in closeups. Even when celebrating Marte’s wedding, we watch Charlotte standing off to the side, feeling detached, never really welcomed into the world. Through her sweet — and somewhat twisted — relationship with her brother, she’s able to come to terms with what’s going on, and maybe get close enough to rock bottom that she can find a good place for herself in the world. There are no Hollywood endings here, but there is hope.
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