Lock and Key
The messy, dichotomous emotions of entrapment and longing for freedom, of familial love and abuse. I've written about a couple of films and recommended some more stuff based on similar themes <3
With desires, distrust, sex as power and bargaining for stability and money, longing and vulnerability, ‘the damned don’t cry’ is an excellent study on yearning. Discussing the effects of trauma on parental care, the film unpicks the shaping of a mother/son relationship but it also goes beyond the familial. It functions as a thematic device that exposes the complications and dependency that poverty creates within human relationships. The two lead characters do not feel like parent and young adult but rather partners in survival and yet complicit in each other’s downfalls. It touches on colonialism, and sexuality, rooted in beautiful cinematography. The home is ever-shifting with lingering images of objects and still-life fake flower displays, building living spaces with what you have. Really loved this film and there is a great foreboding discordant string score too. Would love to see more of this director and how he grows!
With grey trackies, belly button piercings and big hoops, Fish Tank is an instant transportation to growing up on working-class 2000’s estates. This film follows fifteen-year-old Mia as she desperately seeks freedom, the attempt to unchain a horse early on becomes a metaphor for this need. The visuals are such a direct translation of this period it feels hard to write about, like excavating from that which is not buried but simmering under the surface of those who grew up in this time. Charlotte Regan, writer and director of Scrapper, speaks of her desire in her film to find joy in working-class stories and I can’t agree more. I think it is also important however to find the ugly, gristly bits of culture too as it prevents the misconception of the monolith. The half-empty makeup bags and stickers stuck to bunkbeds are a backdrop as the girls of this family play witness to their mother’s love life. Bringing suspect men into their lives as girlhood ceases to exist, I feel wary of who enters their lives and the home. The interest the men exude makes us worry it is seeking something more but then I also wonder if this might be because the lack of love is so present that we forget kindness doesn’t require reciprocation. But as quickly as you question your own perception, the suspicion creeps back in and rightfully so. I remember there being a poster up for this film in my media studies A-level classroom and I was always intrigued by it. I never knew what it was about but it feels strange watching it now, knowing then I had no idea there were films out there which spoke to such close experiences compared to the middle-class Richard Curtis films we were studying.
It is often said you laugh hardest when you need to cry, I think you dance hardest when you need to escape. Streetlights as spotlights as Mia moves to California dreaming, the beach wallpaper backdrop is an absolutely genius pairing. But like Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, there are utterly bleak moments despite this aesthetic having been heavily mimicked for trendy fashion editorials and collections of late. There is an abundance however of authentic films and projects that suggest how some of us need to linger in stories once we’ve escaped; to witness the faux wood cabinets and lilac- painted walls once more. The end scene will break your heart, sometimes when words fail us all we can do is move on the living room dancefloor, ‘say hello to the world for me’.
If you like this———> you might like this!
Sofia Coppola’s retelling of The Virgin Suicides, girls trapped by their mother’s fears, leading to tragic escapes relates heavily to a lot of the works mentioned below——→ The House of Bernada Alba by Federico García Lorca as daughters are also entrapped in their family home with mourning declared for eight years. I saw this play live at The National Theatre, well worth trying to catch it being performed somewhere.
The Iron Claw absolutely snapped me in two but it is an excellent film—> I,Tonya’s themes of extreme dedication to sport and controlling families equally ruined me.
Mustang by Deniz Gamze Ergüven, senses of familial expectation and traditionalism sat alongside the knots and devotion of sisterhood——→ Tice Cin’s masterpiece Keeping The House, a book of beauty and magic alongside the agony of c-ptsd.