Film review

  • Apostasy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Daniel Kokotajlo (2017)

    Apostasy is formidably disciplined.  The writer-director Daniel Kokotajlo’s first feature is the story of crisis within a Lancashire family of Jehovah’s Witnesses.  The visual style of the film – the tight camera movement and cutting, the limited palette, shots that lock characters into the frame, lighting that places them in shadow – creates a claustrophobia analogous to the restrictive, rule-bound existence of single mother Ivanna Whitling (Siobhan Finneran) and her daughters, twentyish Luisa (Sacha Parkinson) and Alex (Molly Wright), who’s just turned eighteen.  With the help of his cinematographer Adam Scarth and editor Napoleon Stratogiannakis, Kokotajlo pushes the viewer straight into what, to the people on the screen, is normal life and this is nearly the only life to which he allows access throughout.  The viewer’s sense of suffocation derives from the increasingly grim and aberrant religious culture in evidence but one of the fascinations of Apostasy is how close – after a while, how agonisingly close – the characters seem to normality.  Ivanna and her daughters don’t look in the least odd.   They use mobile phones. Ivanna has an office job and Luisa drives a car.   Ivanna and Alex occasionally treat themselves to a visit to a nail salon.  The local Kingdom Hall, where several crucial scenes take place, is situated close to a motorway.  There are repeated shots of the Hall’s exterior with motorway traffic passing by – quotidian, oblivious.

    Both daughters cause the family crisis, in very different ways.  Although Kokotajlo shows next to nothing of it, Luisa already engages with another world.  She’s doing a further education course:  a scene involving her, two friends and Alex reveals that Luisa hasn’t told anyone at college that she’s a Jehovah’s Witness.  Even this sequence, shot close-up within the car the four are travelling in, is claustrophobic.  One of the passengers, Umar (Aqib Khan), is in fact Luisa’s boyfriend (and a Muslim).  A little while later, she reveals to Ivanna and Alex that she’s pregnant by him.  When her mother insists that Umar will ‘have to start coming to meetings’, Luisa tells her, ‘It’s not going to happen’.  Her transgression leads to Luisa’s expulsion and ostracisation, known within the faith as ‘disfellowshipping’.  Readmittance is possible if a sinner fully admits the error of their ways and convinces elders they genuinely want to return to the fold.  In the meantime, the Witnesses’ rulebook (a very singular interpretation of Christian scripture) more or less forbids contact with the lost sheep – a proscription that applies equally to members of their family.

    While Luisa’s behaviour seems fairly typical of someone rebelling against the constraints of a repressive religious upbringing, Alex’s predicament is very specific to the family’s denomination.  As a baby, she received a blood transfusion from hospital doctors before elders could stop them – a medical intervention that saved her present life and, according to the Jehovah’s Witness creed, imperilled her eternal one – that is, her prospects of physical resurrection in the ‘new system’ which the sect expects to follow imminent Armageddon.  (They don’t believe in the immortality of the soul, scorned by Ivanna as a tenet of ‘airy-fairy’ religions.)  Alex’s neo-natal treatment has left her with an appetite for atonement that feeds her righteous fervour.  Although permitted to take medication for the anaemia from which she still suffers, she feels compelled to let Steven (Robert Emms), a novice elder recently arrived in the community and keen to initiate a courtship with Alex, know about her impurity.  When her blood disorder suddenly worsens and she requires another transfusion, the fearlessly devout Alex refuses and dies.  By having this happen off-screen, Kokotajlo achieves a strong shock effect.

    After much debate, it’s agreed that Luisa may attend her sister’s funeral service.  (Luisa and Umar have split by now.)  Her return to the Kingdom Hall marks the start of a gripping battle of wills and struggle with consciences in Apostasy.   Urged on by Ivanna, Luisa agrees to seek readmission to the fellowship but her growing religious doubts, anger at Alex’s death and resistance to indoctrination are too great.  Once she’s displeased the elders a second time, they’re all the more hardline in discouraging contact between Luisa and her increasingly conflicted mother.  Ivanna’s dilemma continues throughout Luisa’s pregnancy and after the birth of her baby.   ‘They won’t have blood transfusions’ is one of the first things many people would say if asked to describe Jehovah’s Witnesses.  To that extent, Daniel Kokotajlo’s choice of dramatic catalyst may seem obvious but it’s surely right.  The context of his film is unusual, to say the least.  Taking the opportunity to make a drama out of a crucial part of the Witnesses’ dogma makes good sense.

    Kokotajlo, from Manchester, was raised a Jehovah’s Witness until he too became an apostate in his early twenties.  Personal experience no doubt helped him build up the documentary side of Apostasy.  Luisa and Alex have learned Urdu, as part of an initiative to widen the scope of the campaign for converts; ‘serving where the need is great,’ says Steven admiringly.  His relationship with Alex, of which Ivanna thoroughly approves, implies a system of quasi-arranged marriages operating within the community.  Alex and Steven combine their religious activities with part-time, lowly paid jobs – she gardens, he cleans windows – although Steven has ambitions to be a full-time senior elder whose salary will be enough to keep them both.  The procedural detail in the film is consistently interesting but would count for less than it does if Kokotajlo didn’t link it to convincing individual characters.  Although Alex and Steven are still courting when she falls ill, his enthusiasm seems to ebb as he absorbs the implications of her physical and consequent spiritual condition.  Yet Steven perhaps lacks the personal self-confidence, as well as the clear moral justification, needed to reject Alex, even though, for a career-minded young elder, she is damaged goods.

    The integrity of the writing and direction is matched by the acting.  Apostasy is welcome and eloquent evidence that the words and deeds of objectionable or inhumane people in a film or play are more startling when the actors concerned resist censure of their characters and inhabit them sympathetically.  The immobile face and stiff gait of Siobhan Finneran’s Ivanna dramatise the deadlock between the imperatives of motherhood and religious adherence that are eating at her.  (Ivanna is isolated and unsmiling even within the community of believers.  You want to know more about her backstory but come to accept that withholding that information is part of Kokotajlo’s strategy for placing the audience in the thick of the situation without being able to look outside it.)  Molly Wright’s Alex is pallid yet she has a radiance too:  that may well reflect her religious ardency but its effect is to put her within touching distance of a life beyond the sect and to make her death more tragic.  Sacha Parkinson’s role is relatively conventional but she’s entirely persuasive in it.  Robert Emms is truly excellent as Steven, in whom awkward eagerness, cowardice and a shrewd understanding of where his own best interests lie are intermixed.  His climactic sermon in the Kingdom Hall (‘Jesus stated that his work could cause conflict within the household’) is perhaps slightly overwritten by Kokotajlo, in order to persuade Ivanna that Stephen’s words are aimed at her personally.  But Emms’s delivery is perfect – he gives the words just the right weight.  It’s to the credit of the other actors playing elders that, in their smaller roles, they too resist the temptation to be obviously malignant.  As a result, they’re reliably enraging.

    Just when Ivanna looks to be on the verge of putting family before faith, as we want her to do,   Apostasy pulls the rug from under our feet.  Her last encounter with her daughter and new grandchild builds to a breach with Luisa that may never be healed.  On reflection, perhaps it couldn’t be otherwise.  If Ivanna were fully reconciled with her elder daughter and (thereby) apostasised, she couldn’t avoid recognising the consequences for her younger daughter of the creed that has ruled their lives.  The film’s closing shot is of Ivanna, alone in the street, handing (or least holding) out copies of The Watchtower.  Daniel Kokotajlo doesn’t just keep his nerve in avoiding a comforting resolution.  In doing so, he also keeps faith (as it were) with the unhappily conscientious Ivanna.  The score is credited to Matthew Wilcock:  if it features before the accompaniment to the closing credits, it’s so sparingly and subtly used that I didn’t notice it.  Wilcock’s music at the end appropriately combines a hymnal rhythm and a melancholy tone.  There have been a lot of supposedly ‘stunning’ feature debuts by British film-makers over the last couple of years – Beast, God’s Own Country, I Am Not a Witch, Lady Macbeth, The Levelling, Pin Cushion.  Apostasy, along with I Am Not a Witch, deserves the accolade.

    28 July 2018

  • Summer 1993

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Estiu 1993

    Carla Simón (2017)

    Following the death of her parents, six-year-old Frida (Laia Artigas) is sent to live with her uncle Esteve (David Verdaguer), his wife Marga (Bruna Cusí) and their infant daughter Anna (Paula Robles) in the Catalonian countryside.  In a few weeks’ time, Frida will start school there.  Things happen in Summer 1993 but the writer-director Carla Simón describes a situation – and the behaviour of a single individual within that situation – as much as she tells a story.  It takes a little time to adjust to this but Simón’s film (in Catalan) builds, engages and impresses – all the more in retrospect.

    Both Frida’s parents have died of AIDS, her father first.  While her mother is dying, the child is cared for by her maternal grandparents (Isabel Rocatti and Fermí Reixach) in their Barcelona apartment.  After Frida moves, the grandparents pay more than one visit to their son Esteve’s home and the grandmother especially is anxious for Frida to spend more time with them back in Barcelona.  Esteve and Marga resist, determined to do all they can to help Frida get used to her new surroundings.  She calls Marga and Esteve mummy and daddy but she knows they’re not:  the poignancy of the child’s unhappiness and isolation is increased by the adults trying their best while being aware that they can’t make everything fine – and by Frida’s natural liveliness, her frequent smiles and laughter.  Although her presence in the household creates friction, particularly with Marga, her new parents understand the importance of having difficult conversations out of earshot of Frida, even if they don’t always succeed.   The visually paradisal setting also makes things better and worse for her.  As photographed by Santiago Racaj, the landscape of woodland and water has a lush, new-minted quality.  It invites enchanted exploration at the same time as it heightens Frida’s strangerhood.

    In what is her first feature, Carla Simón shows a sure touch.  She illustrates very well a fine line between the unremarkable and the extraordinary aspects of Frida’s circumstances.  She cuts her knee while playing:  the mother of another child, knowing how Frida’s parents died, drags her daughter away in panic.   Anna, after having her own pretend conversation on the telephone, hands it to Frida and asks if she wants to call her mother.  The summer heat is palpable, in the silence as well as the chirping crickets, and Simón suggests its various emotional effects, sometimes making Frida more restlessly bored, sometimes acting as a kind of anaesthetic.  The exasperated Marga complains to Esteve that ‘the child has no morals’, a phrase that sticks in your mind.  Frida more than once causes trouble, knowing that she doesn’t belong in the way that Anna belongs.  At one point, when they go to play in woodland near the family home, Frida abandons Anna, supposedly as part of their game.  Marga comes out to check on the girls and is soon searching anxiously for Anna.  The next that we see of the younger child, her lower arm is in plaster.  Later, in a public bathing area, Frida, while Esteve’s back is turned, lets the eagerly curious Anna come into the water until she slips beneath it.  Esteve hears the splash, jumps in and rescues Anna, shouting angrily at Frida, ‘Are you trying to kill her or something?’  It’s a strong moment:  partly because Esteve is, for the most part, calm and quiet (sometimes determinedly so); partly because the truthful answer to his question, to which the shocked Frida doesn’t reply, may not be an unequivocal no.

    There are no flashbacks – no picture, in other words, of Frida’s life with her mother (one assumes she’s too young to remember her father).  The lack of any comparison of Frida’s past and present might seem to limit the film.  In fact, it proves an effective way of reflecting the painful inaccessibility of her former world.  The accidents involving Anna depend on inattention that’s uncharacteristic of Marga and Esteve.  Otherwise, nothing in the film rings at all false and the closing stages are extraordinarily well put together.  After having to be dragged from her grandparents’ car as they prepare to leave, Frida decides to return to Barcelona under her own steam.  She sets out late one night, while Marga and Esteve are asleep, but not before Anna has woken up and asked what she’s doing.  The younger child obviously lets her parents know and Frida doesn’t get far.  As the family returns home, she says matter of factly, ‘It’s too dark:  I’ll go tomorrow’.  She doesn’t, though, and this crisis is something of a turning point.  Simón cuts to a local carnival, in which Frida has a key role in the parade:  she looks up euphorically at Esteve, Marga and Anna, watching in the stands.  The final scene takes place on the eve of Frida’s starting her new school.   She and Anna giggle and bounce on their bed as hard as they can; Esteve joins in the fooling around; Marga looks on, smiling.  Frida’s laughter suddenly turns to sobs.  The parents ask what’s wrong and if she’s hurt herself.  She shakes her head and insists she’s fine, knowing that she is and she isn’t.  Her bursting into tears is mixture of persisting grief and relief at having become part of the family to the extent that she now has.  This makes for a very moving ending.

    The film is strongly autobiographical and Carla Simón dedicates it to her mother (whether her birth mother or her adoptive mother, I don’t know).  The signs of autobiography are present throughout – in the lack of contrived incident, the focus on a single character’s moods and perspective, the precise date of the title.  (There’s very little in the film that’s comparably time-specific:  the attitudes towards AIDS place the story in the past but not in a particular year.  The title also suggests that Simón is still only in her very early thirties.)  Simón has not assumed, as writer-directors often seem to assume, that putting your personal history on the screen is a necessary guarantee of authenticity, a proof that all is true.  Summer 1993 is refreshing in that recreating her own experience hasn’t at all stifled the film-maker’s imagination.  What she gets from the two young children, especially Laia Artigas, is magically natural and expressive:  I can’t begin to think how Simón achieved this.  This film probably had to be made by a woman:  it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that some of the bathtime and bedtime sequences, which are proof of how much trust Simón built in her cast, would have been less kindly reviewed if the gaze behind the camera had been a male one.  All the adults are good but David Verdaguer’s subtle naturalistic performance is outstanding.  As well as being great with the children, Verdaguer beautifully conveys the stresses and sadness that Esteve is trying to contain.

    26 July 2018

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