Firouzeh Khosrovani’s Radiograph of a Family stresses an unforgettable motif. The filmmaker’s camera travels through her family home in Iran from the living room to the parental bed’s headboard, each iteration of this tracking shot capturing the state of her family’s affairs as furnishings and decorations become more sparse and less Western. It’s a slick and slow shot that bears the solemnity of a death march, an eerie metaphor for a family that crumbles once the mother refuses to carry the weight of kinship all by herself.
The film is stitched together through re-enacted dialogue between Khosrovani’s parents, whose personal stories crisscross Iran’s troubled political history. We learn that they first met when Khosrovani’s father visited his native Iran after living for many years in Switzerland, where he had been studying medicine. They start dating and he soon proposes. The mother hesitates to move to Geneva with him, afraid of leaving her country for a non-Islamic one and for a husband who isn’t bound by Sharia law, and who speaks Farsi with a French accent.
For the mother, who eventually moves to Geneva with the father, Switzerland is full of “signs of sin,” as women wear revealing clothes and the populace likes to dance instead of pray. The father is sweet, albeit absent, spending his time on campus with his Western friends while the mother waits for him at home, staring at his objects: photos, books, a piano. She’s surprised, even unsettled, by his refusal to boss her around in evident ways. She can do what she wants, but she ultimately does what he wants, such as taking a skiing trip that results in the splintering of her spine—surely the somatization of a long-felt disintegration.
Cinematic self-ethnographies are often an opportunity for the child of yore, now a filmmaker, to rewrite the history of their family. Secrets are uncovered, generational myths are debunked, and symbolic inheritances are challenged. This usually involves a dive into domestic archives: forgotten boxes, dusty letters, decaying filmstock, and tattered photographs. In Radiograph of a Family, such revelations follow the usual tropes but are rendered literal through X-rays of the filmmaker’s mother’s body. The narration of Khosrovani’s family history is centered around the image of the body’s inner workings, made all the more uncanny by the fact that the doctor who makes the mother’s fractured insides visible is the father, who’s a radiologist.
Radiograph of a Family is an essay film about photographs—their contents, their hoarding, and their disappearance—as barometers of female unhappiness. Khosrovani’s mother is reticent about having her image taken even before her accident. The father’s insensitivity toward her bashfulness (he says that her response to his photographic requests should be: “with pleasure my darling”) reveals his distaste for the veil she wears in public, which alludes to the possibility of her own agency within their relationship.
The accident becomes a turning point in the history of the filmmaker’s family, as the mother finds a place for herself in Islamic extremism and becomes increasingly involved in the armed struggle for Jihad. Although this latter plot twist, or denouement, is extremely dramatic, the film’s real interest lies in the more minute violence of domesticity, which is subtly conveyed by the filmmaker’s tracking shots of the childhood home that slowly disintegrates with each iteration of the aesthetic maneuver. Picture frames go missing, as do regal chandeliers, and bedsheets suddenly appear draped atop old furniture, the past cannily rendered ghostlike.
Writer-director Kim Mi-jo’s Gull explores what erupts when women decide to walk away from their passive positions and speak up through more fictitious and allegorical means. O-bok (Jeong Ae-hwa), a woman in her 60s who’s worked at a fish market in Seoul for decades, starts bleeding and we don’t know why. At first, it seems as if she’s ill, but then we realize that she’s nursing the aftermath of a sexual assault committed by a co-worker.
O-bok’s initial impulse is to hide the traces of the rape as if she were the criminal, fearing stigma and retaliation. But she eventually tells the truth to one of her daughters and once they press charges the entire neighborhood seems to find out. They all turn against her. How dare she rock the boat and expose the fish market as the site of such unsavory occurrences?
As she musters up enough courage to take on a world where even her husband thinks that “you can’t rape a girl unless she wants it too,” O-bok realizes that it’s a woman’s silence that grants her membership in her community. To speak out is to don a scarlet letter, which she’s increasingly willing to do, especially as she sees herself surrounded by women whose lives were wasted by putting everyone but themselves first: from a daughter preparing to enter into a traditional marriage to a mother suffering from dementia, her life literally slipping away.
After a while, O-bok becomes akin to Marion Cotillard’s character from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Two Days, One Night, reduced to exposing solidarity as a fictitious concept. At times, the film also feels conspicuously anchored by topicality, with scene after scene reminding us this is a film about sexual assault. The most touching moments in Gull are the ones where O-bok is allowed to be a multifaceted person, not just a crusader seeing the plot through, as well as when the drama is steeped in the nuanced sorrows of everyday life. That is, when the film is less worried about its message than its protagonist’s wounds, as in a beautiful scene where O-bok’s ailing mother calls her only to asks her who she is.
Not too surprised that her mother has forgotten her, O-bok is compelled to reintroduce herself as her mother’s daughter, bringing her up to date on her kids’ lives and, eventually, decrying her mother for not having allowed her to study. Maybe if she had gotten an education she would have found a place for herself on this Earth. O-bok weeps and the camera doesn’t budge. Her mother then randomly asks her for shellfish, as if six decades’ worth of repressed feelings hadn’t just finally seen the light of day. O’bok promptly snaps out of her misery, for now, shifting back to the negationist safety of the external world.
The New Directors/New Films runs from April 28—May 8.
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