3 films, 3 characters, 3 actresses : 3 gems
iView Author: Arthi V (Delhi, India)
Email: vasudevan [dot] arthi [at] gmail [dot] com
3 films, 3 characters, 3 actresses : 3 gems
I watched three films over the past one week. Three films so different from one another and yet quite compelling. Of course, the degree to which I was drawn into the story differed but all the three remained with me long after the end credits began to roll.
A co-incidence, when I think of it now, that all the three stories have the female lead as the protagonist.
Sarah Polley as Hanna in ‘The Secret Life of Words’
Emily Mortimer as Jessie in ‘Transsiberian’
Catalina Sandino Moreno as Maria in ‘Maria Full of Grace’
I do not know yet what exactly am I writing on. The three films? Or the three women who defined these? My thoughts are still unclear.
It’s said that one is more than the sum total of all experiences he / she has in her life. True. At times one experience gains the upper hand, leaves deep scars (physical and emotional) which in turn gives form to a new facet to oneself. A facet that slowly and steadily reveals only itself to the world. Draws the victim into a cocoon of trauma that only time and may be future experiences can help the person come out of.
At other times, the experiences just add on, the person makes choices and moves on in life. The incidents don’t “change” the person per se, but they define who the person is and wants to be. So the experiences in a way are choices made. What happens thereafter is a different story altogether.
Experiences, also at times, reveal an innate character and attitude of the person. An approach that is capable of overcoming the worst of situations. Not bowing to what is offered or pushed into the face but standing straight always ready to find a way out.
It’s natural that we all do experience the above three but still one does take a major chunk than the others I feel. This is what defines the core of the person. This is what I found in the women in each of the three films.
Hanna in the cocoon….
Jessie as the once-free-spirited turned sober married wife whose past actions decides the future ones.
Maria, the rising phoenix….
Hanna is a victim of war abuse. Losing her best friend and family to the atrocities that war brings on with it, Hanna herself isn’t spared. Physically an emotionally tortured, she loses her hearing ability, gains painful memories that find their way deep into her psyche anchoring themselves only to engulf her into a cocoon where no one is ever allowed to enter.
Taking up shop-floor work in a factory and living alone in some obscure little town, Hanna has condemned herself to a life of alienation. She just survives each day, I guess, with the hope that the end will come soon. She is ready. Until she decides to tend to a burn victim Josef (Tim Robbins, quite old for this role) at an oil rig. From one isolated place to another. It suited her fine. Forced to go on a vacation (after four years of non-stop work) by her boss, she just grabs the opportunity to become a nurse for a few weeks.
What happens at the oil rig is what ‘The secret life of words’ is about. The title somewhat made me curious about the film. When I read it for the first time, the phrase ‘The secret life of words’ was more like something to with the characters expressing themselves each one in his/her own way hence defining the story about misunderstandings due to miscommunication.
After watching the film, I realized that I could not have been more wrong. And may be the title was a tad misleading. The story was more to do with how deep-rooted experiences articulate themselves in words just due to that one stimulus from the outside world that creates cracks in the wall of isolation. Cracks that help the person inside to break open and free him / her self by expression through words
Of course, there is no guarantee that this outcome is always as desired but on one level, I feel that whatever happens finally is the best outcome for that person.
For me, it is the process of breaking open from inside that is expected to be excruciatingly painful and torturous. It takes a lot of hard knocking for the stimulus too.
But somehow that did not happen and that’s where I felt very dissatisfied. Hanna begins to tend to Josef and from day one, conversation one, Josef gets very curious about her.
This for me was very forced. Some more conversations later and there, Hanna is breaking down and baring all. There are only a few glimpses of Hanna truly struggling with herself and her emotions. For me, I wanted more of that. Because that was what the story was about I felt. Josef gets it all easy and the manner in which we get to the ending is very contrived.
I nearly broke down when Hanna finally tells her story to Josef and more so in the near last scene when she says: ‘Um, because I think that if we go away to someplace together, I’m afraid that, ah, one day, maybe not today, maybe, maybe not tomorrow either, but one day suddenly, I may begin to cry and cry so very much that nothing or nobody can stop me and the tears will fill the room and I won’t be able to breathe and I will pull you down with me and we’ll both drown’. It seems like just words here but Sarah Polly puts in so much pain and dignity in this I just wanted to reach out and hold her. She is very good in this film. But for these few scenes rest of the story moves on predictably. There is a voiceover of a child form the beginning of the film that at times describes what Hanna may be feeling. But I didn’t understand why this was introduced. I think it’s the child that Hanna has lost (no clue how) but why was this track put in I have not quite understand till now.
I liked this film but I felt I was introduced to some extremely traumatic lives and I came away not quite moved by what happens to them; especially Hanna. And I really disliked this about The Secret Life of Words.
This is just not so about Jessie’s story in Transsiberian. I don’t remember the last time I saw a film where in the background music introduced me to the story. Or rather insinuated at what I am seeing is not quite the story. Barren snow-filled landscape. Ships anchored at a port. Two cars driving down. Next, the Russian Anti Narcotics team headed by Ben Kingsley is investigating a murder. A man sitting ready to have dinner but knifed behind in the nape. Drugs stolen, probably by a rival gang. Routine stuff. Seems like. Or is it?
Cut to an American couple leaving China after doing some charity work for under-privileged children. They decide to take the Transsiberian train from Beijing to Moscow and then fly down home from there. Jessie and Rob (Emily Mortimer and Woody Harrelson) are the normal couple for whom just a train ride can be an adventure of sorts.
A few stations later, another couple joins them in their suite. The very smooth-talking and the very flirtatious Carlos and the very young and somewhat mysterious Abby.
All four begin to hang out together, meeting up in the diner regularly and chatting up but its Abby’s reticence and silent disapproval of Carlos getting close to Jessie and Rob (especially Jessie) that made me feel that this couple is upto something. Or they have done something and are now on the run. Is this it? Not so sure.
All seem ok but still I could feel that something is happening and I’m not able to piece the clues together.
At a station, Rob and Carlos get down to check the various engines while Jessie, for the first time opens up to Abby. Because she sees in Abby herself when she was twenty. Run away from home at 16, lived and traveled extensively, did drugs, jail terms Jessie was the quintessential ‘bad girl’. Abby, she fears is on the same path. Abby doesn’t say much but slightly warms up to her. That is enough to for me understand who Jessie is. And this conversation for me formed the basis for certain actions Jessie takes hereby landing herself and Rob in a big mess.
Rob misses the train at a station. While waiting at a motel for Rob to catch up the next day, Carlos, because the police are checking trains for drugs, loads all his Russian dolls into Jessie’s suitcase. Furthermore, he doesn’t let go of a chance to get close to Jessie charmingly coaxing her to go along on a local trip with him.
At times certain situations present themselves and entice one back into the dark past. One succumbs or one strongly moves on. Jessie, in a moment of weakness of getting her back to her former wild ways, falls for Carlos and when he pushes her further she backs out realizing her folly. The tryst ends gruesomely and Jessie realizes the mess she’s got into. Drugs in her suitcase add to the chaos.
Rob hops onto the train back later and with him comes Ben Kingsley. All panicky now, Jessie amateurishly tries to cover up but ultimately gives in. Does she completely? Not quite as Kingsley and team are after Carlos and Abby for reasons not quite clear.
One after another Jessie covers up bluffing her way deeper and deeper into a quagmire where the end seems inevitable. Through all this I just felt that had Jessie not been the girl she was or rather had she been able to overcome her past it would have been a very straightforward story.
But it didn’t happen and her actions made the ride a true roller coaster one. Superbly set on a single train across the vast deserted snow-covered lands of Siberia, I just felt what if she just tells the complete truth? Why isn’t she? Of course not, because she isn’t the one who’d do so. Being cornered, the end brings a sudden twist that actually opens the doors for all the leads in a different direction altogether. A very good film and Jessie was the reason. Harrelson for a change takes a backseat and the delicate looking Emily Mortimer just brings Jessie alive. She is super in her performance – very different from her characters in Lars and the Real Girl, Chaos Theory and other few films but none like this. None.
But not for Maria is this kind of hyper action life. In complete contrast, the protagonist of ‘Maria full of grace’ is just born to internalize pain and try to find a way out of any problem. In her own way according to her own understanding of people and situations.
Born into a comparatively poor Columbian family comprising of a grandmother, mother and elder sister with a baby, Maria, at 16, works at a flower factory to make ends meet.
Finding herself pregnant one day, she splits with her boyfriend but decides to keep the baby. Well, there is already a similar example at home in the form her elder sister and Maria avows not to get into that condition. What will she do then?
It’s very easy to fall to prey to wayward means of earning lots of money and Maria, I find out, is no exception. A chance meeting with some guy at a party leads her to becoming a drug mule. To carry drugs into the United States obviously without getting caught. Carrying by swallowing small an inch sized pellets.
Maria, pregnant, agrees to do so. The manner in which she is introduced to swallowing these pellets by a fellow mule is quite subtle but in-the-face nonetheless. Seemingly aware of the complexities, she takes it up all just for the money.
The journey begins and so does the test. At every step, I thought, this girl is going to land into some trouble with the authorities. She does, eventually, at the New York airport customs. Predictable I thought. That is when the film took for a super gradual turn that then gave meaning to the title of the film. She scrapes through the officers scrutiny but becomes the spectator of what happens to the fellow mule as a pellet breaks inside her. It happens at the hotel but the drug peddlers open her up take all the other pellets and dump her body. When Maria finds the bathroom bloody and her body being taken away she panics and escapes with her friend who has also joined her on this mission.
Lost in New York, the drug pellets with them, the 2 young girls manage to find their way to the dead girl’s sister. What happens then reveals Maria’s strength and her vulnerability. What does she say to the sister? Where is she going to live? How is she going to go back? The drugs? What’s to be done? One decision she makes leads her into another situation that forces her to think her way out. It’s easy for me to write this and this happened and what she did but no. The essence is to see it all unraveling and slowly understanding Maria and her strength of character. It’s innate. No matter where you are from.
The last scenes where she decides what to do with herself is so very well depicted. Very composed and dignified. Life is very very uncertain but yes, I think I am capable of making my way through it. That is Maria.
Super film. No. Super-girl. Maria, indeed full of grace.
3 films. 3 women characters that gave meaning to them. 3 really good actresses that brought them alive on screen. In the end, a disconcerting yet satisfying experience
Tags: 'Maria Full of Grace', 'The Secret Life of Words', 'Transsiberian', Catalina Sandino, Emily Mortimer, Sarah Polley
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Excellent Article Arthi,
Sarah Polley turned Scriptwriter and Director for “Away from her” starring Julie Christie, Watch it !!!
Emily Mortimer is the most sought after actress in Hollywood.
Catalina Sandino Moreno also starred in “The Hottest State” and a brief role in “Love in the time of Cholera”
GK
I have yet to watch these films but your perspectives are nice!
Catalina Sandino Moreno was phenomenal in MFOG…. was totally bowled over…anyway….nice write-up:)
Tx ppl. So true Sulakshana. I really liked the mixed expressions on her face – vunerable, hesitant and yet the boldness to get ahead. For a debut, amazing! She an actress to watch out for..
totally agree….and you know what…..i saw MFOG right after watching Fight Club….So indeed…Catalina had something that made me so enthralled
Sulakshana, you watched Fight Club and then came to Maria Full of Grace? Whoa…How did you manage to watch nethg after seeing FC? Amazing.
For me, I went quite off after I saw FC. For quite some time.
for that matter let me inform you….i saw Schindler’s List right before watching FC and MFOG next…lol
Arti V, i beg to differ about ‘Transiberian’ being a ‘a very good film’ but you are spot on about Emily. Pity the director opted for a traditional thriller foramt rather than a good drama
ohhkk….No words Sulakshana…No words…
@ DPac – Good drama as in? Could you plz elab? Didn’t quite get this.