A painful love-letter through time
Daniel Nelson
The first sniff suggests an earnest, jerky, home movie. Stay with it, and watch this introspective documentary infiltrate your brain.
It’s so intensely personal that The Taste of Mango makes you feel you are intruding, as Sri Lankan British artist and film-maker Chloe Abrahams teases out the event that lies at the heart of the relationship between herself, her mother and grandmother in both islands.
“I made this film as a way of connecting three generations in my own family, and I hope it helps to open up healing conversations across the UK and Ireland,” says Abrahams.
Talk of healing, and its sense of love, affection and family is extraordinary given that the basic family rift is over a rape within the family and the different responses to it. Abrahams has admitted that her first attempt to make the film was angry. She says it is also informed by her own experience of sexual violence as a teenager.
She uses interviews, raw camcorder footage, abstract imagery and carefully chosen Country and Western tracks to build this quietly unusual film that the blurb describes as “a love-letter through time”.
It’s a love-letter that surmounts anger, frustration, repression and tension through patience, determination, tenderness, morality, honesty and, yes, love.
The film is not for everyone. It’s thoughtful, unhurried, allusive, elliptical. Too arty for some.
But there are steel shards at its heart. The flavour is captured in an interview with Abrahams:
Q. It must have been easier to present thei dea for the film to your mother than to your grandmother. How did your grandmother respond to the idea?
A. “They both welcomed it in their own way. My mum has wanted to tell this story for a long time, and so she jumped at the opportunity to make a film about it with me. My grandmother alsospeaks openlya bout her life story. She had specific concerns about what she wanted to exclude from the film, which I was happy to honour.
So she had clear boundaries, but from the beginning she was supportive.
Q: Can you talk about the decision to include the more abstract, experimental footage with your voice-overs?
A: My first idea for this film was an observational documentary about my grandmother. I soon realised that I wanted to shoot with a camcorder and that I wanted an intimate, first-person feeling. I’d often zoom into abstract shapes and sit with them for a long time – it seemed that that’s where my mind wanted to go. Whate merged was my desire for the film to feel like we’re entering my head, going into my state of mind and my thoughts.
The first of those moments was the abstract close-up of water when my mum describes being assaulted on a beach as an 11-year-old. When one of the editors, Stella Heath Keir, put the image and voice together, something immediately felt right. The image alone holds within it the possibility of beauty, of memory, of Rorschach’s inkblots.
As we keep watching, the water’s movement, which builds alongside my mum’s voice, charges the image with another possible interpretation – one of a young girl focusing on water lapping on the seashore to take herself away from the brutal violence she is experiencing.
The Taste of Mango will be in UK cinemas from 29 November