The debut feature from Canadian director Miryam Charles is a work of haunting beauty.
Grief is a tricky beast. Left unchecked it can ruin lives, but when grappled with has the capacity to help people find themselves again – that’s one of the many reasons it’s such a fascinating emotion for cinema to try and untangle. And it’s especially interesting when it is tied into other ideas and themes for filmmakers to explore. Enter Cette Maison.
The debut feature of Canadian director Miryam Charles is a work of beauty: haunting and moving in equal measure, it’s a battle with grief based on the real-life death of Charles’ teenage cousin that takes that event and imagines a future that could tragically never be. Cette Maison is one of those films that creeps up on you slowly, gradually pulling you in before flooring you by the time the credits roll and disappearing into the night. It’s an extremely impressive debut piece, and undoubtedly worth seeking out when it begins its staggered release in UK cinemas.
There’s a lot going on in the film, and that’s something aided by its inherently sprawling nature. It packs so much into its 70-minute runtime that it’s impressive it isn’t longer, but everything about it is so fine-tuned that it doesn’t need to be any longer – it’s a mark of a good editor (Xi Feng) that the film is so economical, exploring everything it needs to while never feeling overstuffed or underbaked. It’s certainly a well-paced piece, never dragging while it jumps from scene to scene, or time period to time period. And it’s a good job, too, because a film as ambitious as this could have been endlessly confusing in the hands of a less capable director.
What’s arguably most fascinating about Cette Maison is the specific way in which it chooses to explore grief. Its protagonist is Tessa (played by the wonderful Schelby Jean-Baptiste), who is found dead by her family a little way into the film – but Tessa doesn’t disappear. No, instead she serves as spectre and guide, first observing her family as they learn of her demise and later spends time with her mother (an excellent Florence Blain Mbaye) in an imagined future. Separated from the constraints of linear time, Tessa is free to move forwards and backwards at will, exploring her childhood before her death and following her family after she’s gone, and it’s this that may be confusing for some viewers: if she died, how is she in the future, talking and interacting with people? That, folks, is the magic of cinema – and Charles understands this.
She doesn’t feel the need to answer questions like “Is Tessa really there or not?” because she knows the answers aren’t what are important. What’s important isn’t always the logic, but the feeling. She’s an artist using her imagination to try and give her cousin some semblance of the life she was robbed of through her art – logic doesn’t really come into that endeavour. And really, that’s one of Cette Maison’s greatest strengths: that it doesn’t hold the viewer’s hand or spell everything out for them, but instead expects that they’re smart enough to keep up. This may initially be a little disarming, admittedly, but once the film settles into a rhythm it becomes the exact opposite of a problem.
One thing that helps matters is that the film is gorgeous to look at. Shot on 16mm, it’s packed to the brim with stunning colours and vistas. Moving, handheld shots of Haitian countryside and urban areas feel at once lived in, comforting, and terrifying, and contrast beautifully with the distinct soundstages on which interior scenes are filmed. The black backdrops of many of these interiors allow the colours of costumes, sets, food and props to really pop in the foreground. It’s also an extremely refreshing change to see a film that knows how to properly light Black skin – something many movies still have yet to figure out.
But above all, what really makes Cette Maison work are the performances. Schelby Jean-Baptiste is the perfect choice for Tessa, beautifully walking the line between childish innocence and sudden grownup maturity. Jean-Baptiste narrates parts of the film through voiceover, and speaks to camera at other times as if she’s speaking to her mother, and Hollywood should take notes: if you want to exposit your characters’ feelings, this is how you do it. Her voice is so easy to get lost in, while the words themselves are unflinchingly honest and heartbreaking. Opposite Jean-Baptiste is the aforementioned Florence Blain Mbaye as Tessa’s mother, who is equally wonderful to watch. She takes the audience through so many emotions in such a short space of time – a scene in which Valeska and other family members are told about Tessa’s death by a doctor is a particular tear-jerker. Through the excellent work of both performers, Charles’ already-stellar script is elevated into something ethereal purely by the way she puts her film together.
Feature debuts rarely come this impressive. What seems at first a closed-off work becomes, over the course of seventy divine minutes, something altogether more magical. It’s messy in places, yes, but that’s what grief is – that’s what it does to people. It fractures them, ruins their perception of the world around them and leaves them with only their memories and an imagined future no longer accessible to them. But through it, as Cette Maison finds, we might still find hope, and, eventually, peace.
Cette Maison begins its UK cinema release on November 4. For more information, visit T A P E Collective.
Images courtesy of T A P E Collective. All rights reserved.