Years ago, I tried to make a film consisting of three interlocking stories that shared a theme. It didn't work out so well. The stories had fit together so beautifully in my head and on paper, but on film it just wasn't going to work. They were too different, the thematic links were turning out to be tenuous, I was trying to shoehorn three stories to fit an idea I'd had months before... a recipe for much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth. Thanks to some luck and a supportive team, I was able to salvage the film by re-thinking it completely, but I vowed never to try this again - no more threes.
This is the first thing I thought of when watching Rama Rau's Losing My Religion. The film, made for the doc strand on Omni, the multicultural broadcaster, is an exploration of the way people's faith changes in a new cultural environment. The three subjects are: a woman who came to Canada as a child and has rejected her parents' Ismaili Muslim faith, a Sikh boxer who battled the Canadian Amateur Boxing Association for the right to compete while bearded, and a man from the former Portuguese colony of Goa who's converting from Catholicism to Hinduism after studying the colonial history of this Indian state.
On paper, it works: the apostate, the devout, and the convert - a nice triangle. I can imagine how the proposal was written. But in reality, these stories are so different that it's difficult to see how they belong together in one film. The Ismaili woman argues with her mother and thinks about how she and her Danish husband will raise their soon-to-be-adopted child. There seems to be little at stake for her: her religion was lost long ago, and neither her disappointed but sweet parents nor her secularist husband seem to be making a big issue of it. The boxer simply recounts his (long-ago, it turns out) battle with the boxing authorities, but we learn little about the nature of his devotion to his Sikh faith. Did having to take a stand bring him closer to his faith? Or was he just being stubborn, as befits a young boxer? And the convert... well, his main interest is the history of Goa, which strays very far from the theme of transformation in the diaspora. His motivation and concerns appear to be very different from those of the other subjects, and while he's definitely a familiar type of immigrant intellectual, his change of faith just doesn't strike me as fitting into this film at all.
Losing My Religion is about three very different intellectual and emotional journeys, but it never gives a sense of the internal struggle that people who take faith seriously go through on their way to losing it. Perhaps that's why we don't see the commonality among the three subjects -- the struggle would have been the common element that would have tied them together. Instead, it feels like all they have in common is their South Asian heritage.
Stylistically, the film has its virtues. The boxer is a quirky little man (yes, little - he fights in the light flyweight division) who drives a freakish vintage lowrider. And the camera moves nicely with him as he drives, runs, trains, etc. But there is less opportunity for a cinematic treatment of the other subjects, and they pale in comparison.
So all in all, my advice to any young filmmaker contemplating a film about three unconnected characters: think very, very hard before you shoot a frame. Then find one great character and forget about the rest.
3 comments:
So what did you think of Iraq in Fragments then? Three separate stories in three separate areas of Iraq. .
Hi and thanks for the candid review. It really helps to see that all the faults I saw in my film are also seen by others - not pleasant, but helpful! And, of course, even being reviewed is helpful enough, to take a step back and see where I could have done things better.
Yes, it's really tough to have 3 characters but I don't agree that one should always have just one character - if you look at Jessica Yu's 'Protagonist', she did a competent job of portraying more than one character in her film and I think one can do it - tough but possible.
Another thing is that while outwardly the only thing that seems to link the 3 characters in my film seems to be their skin colour, the real thread is oppression - the sometimes subtle, sometimes overt oppression some non-white, non-Christian people face or think they face, is what the film is really about. Colonialism, though historic, is still linked to post 9/11 trauma. And, obviously, the term 'religion' was never meant to be taken literally throughout the film. Even though there are rituals and faith based arguments, the theme speaks of all of us losing our faith in the world around us and how some of us deal with that - with blind fanaticism, with stoic scholarly wisdom or with just blatant rebellion - hence the range of characters is important, rather than portraying a more narrow sense of perspective.
Yes, I most certainly agree. Three characters is very hard to fit into a master structure. Why do people always feel attracted by the power of the three?
A Canadian film called Cheating Death is a fine example of how one character can carry a film rather than trying to interveawe numerous stories into one film.
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