The film is clear in structure, like the diagram of a sentence. A friendship between two women is at the center. We quickly see that there is a dominant through line. One friend is stable, the other is not. We understand that the probability is that the less stable woman will deteriorate before our eyes.
The search for causality becomes a part of the dynamic. Those who populate Jo’s life seek to understand, and Jo herself is haunted by the notion that she’s hiding from something. It becomes clear that Jo thinks of her life as before and after age fourteen.
I saw a second set of dynamics. In contrast to the symptoms of illness, with or without trauma.
Jo and Mara represent different relationships with the establishment. Mara is concerned about her own security, and finds and keeps jobs that provide for her. Jo is not a dedicated adventuress, but she is somewhat cavalier about jobs. This is made manifest by the repetition of failing to show up, and getting fired, and by her veneer of nonchalance.
I am of the opinion that the filmmaker is quite conscious of the imperfections in the culture. That is to say, I don’t think the intention of the filmmaker is simply to juxtapose the healthy and well adjusted woman with the mentally ill, and consequently poorly adjusted woman. The utterly straightforward presentation, carefully, it seems to me, restrained dialogue, and the narrow focus has the paradoxical result of drawing to our attention the flat responses and compulsory behaviors that dominate society.
Mental health, obviously, can be better or worse, and the psychiatric world dispenses pills putatively in order to limit symptoms of chemical imbalances of diverse kinds. One of the ways in which our society has sustained a doctrinaire and academic definition of itself is with a simultaneously protective, even sacrosanct, and punitive view of those whose mental health is poor. Mental health is neglected. Those who know people with mental troubles find themselves, as Mara poignantly does, in a position that requires that they distance themselves in order not to end up distraught themselves. While I am not arguing that many suffer from chemical imbalances or mental disease, I do advocate for an awareness of the dynamics between society and the individuals within it as a crucial element of the process of determining what constitutes mental health. Questions can then follow: are we, in general, too frightened by sadness, ambivalence, loneliness, grief, ecstasy or chaos to even know what mental health really is?
The most beautiful shot in the film is a depiction of a train station. We see it first from far away, and then finally the people become distinct. They walk away, each following a unique path. The shot is both daring cinematically and provocative philosophically. It works well as a poetic anchor to the macro concerns I describe. It also works as an anchor if viewing the film as the story of two women, one strong, the other lacking in resilience.
The film is, as I said, restrained. The filmmaker doesn’t delve too much into the respective lives of the women. He doesn’t seek energetically to find the causal chain. Instead, he recognizes who much we yearn to know.
This level of understatement is very difficult to achieve, and deserves our admiration. The relinquishing of innumerable opportunities for heightened drama offers us a window to the world, very much as great painters can.
A very good film…
(Note: by coincidence, or fortuitously, I just listened to a few minutes of Christopher Hitchens articulating problematic aspects of religion. He used this phrase: ‘In the structure of religion, we have a world in which we are created sick, and must be made well.’ Other contiguous remarks included recognizing that we become objects in such a structure. All structures, all systems, have similar propensities, secular or religious.)