TIFF 2021 YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER: Reflections by Carol Borden

By Carol Borden 

Kate Dolan’s You Are Not My Mother (Ireland, 2021) has it all: Irish folk horror! Fraught family dinners! Teen girl drama! Possible Lesbianism! Ostracism! Halloween/Samhain! These are things that I normally have a lot to say about, but I have to restrain myself and wait. So let’s get to some thoughts I can share now without revealing too much.

The film opens with a baby in a baby stroller on a street a night. An old woman with a limp takes the baby away and seems to put it in a ring of fire. We watch the woman’s face as it cries. And then teenager Char Delaney (Hazel Doupe) wakes up. She lives with her mother, Angela (Carolyn Bracken), and grandmother (Ingrid Craige). Angela suffers from depression. This morning, Char asks her mother to drive her to school and Angela manages to get herself out of bed and into the car, but struggles mightily when Angela asks her to go to the shops and get some food for the house after dropping her off. After a near accident with a folk horror element leaves them sitting in the car in the village green, Angela tells Char, “I can’t do this anymore.” Frustrated with her mom’s inability to, well, mom, Char leaves the car and walks the short distance to school alone. And then Angela disappears.

Char and her Uncle Aaron (Paul Reid) are worried, though Aaron tries to reassure Char. But Char’s grandmother is certain that Angela will return. And Angela does late that night, but something’s not right. It’s just hard to say what. Is it her new meds? Is it manic-depression? Is it something else? She’s manic and dancing and not careful with her own body or others. Char’s grandmother is also acting suspicious. She watches Angela and interferes with Angela’s attempts to repair her relationship with Char. And Char is alone. Her family is ostracized by the community. Her schoolmates at her local Catholic school (*cough* “Brigid” *cough*) bully her. It seems they always have abused her. This time it’s ostensibly because they worry that she’ll rat them out as they plan a bonfire for Halloween / Samhain. Except for Suzanne (Jordanne Jones) who bullies Char, but also seems kind of into her.  And what’s up with this impending school field trip to a site with pre-Christian stone carvings?  

The film has a suitable moody, Gothic look at night. In the daytime, the cinematography and blocking emphasizes Char’s isolation, especially in the lighting of her school. And the soundtrack by Die Hexen (aka, “The Witches” in German) helps maintain the mood without being obtrusive. All the performances are excellent, but I want to single out Hazel Doupe and Carolyn Bracken. As Char, Doupe does a tremendous amount of work with just her eyes, which always impresses me, as she tries in the beginning to maintain a front that everything is fine and later maintain an appearance of calm to avoid setting off cruel classmates, her family and ultimately her mother. Bracken does a remarkable job as Angela swings from bone-crushing guilt, weariness and love to manic joy to confusion at Char’s fear and, in the end, to a monstrous love.

You Are Not My Mother is one of my favorite movies of the festival this year and I am excited to write more about it in more depth after it has been more widely released.

JOHN BOORMAN: CONCLUSIONS. Some Thoughts Upon Reading

                                Mike Lane, Sarah Mitchell, John Boorman & Robert Mitchell
                                         The Lilly Library Indiana University Oct. 27th, 2016

 “In old age, words escape me. If I wait patiently, they float up, and I recapture them. If that fails, I am obligated to go down to the cellar, where they languish, and drag them back up. I note that water is starting into the cellar. I fear that some words will drown and be lost for ever. The quest for harmony of word and image has been my life. Sight loss is making the world look like Turners. While I still can, I hasten to testify.” John Boorman

One begins to read a book on John Boorman to further gain insight into the thoughts of a unique filmmaker who directed films such as Zardoz, Point Blank, Excalibur, Deliverance. To this end the book will satisfy those looking for further insight and kernels of more film knowledge. Such as Lee Marvin agreed to make Point Blank on the condition that they throw out the existing script and start anew. As well as how it was David Lean who unknowingly saved Point Blank and Mr. Boorman's first American feature film from being stopped before production was set to begin.

The book begins with the heading TYPEWRITER and Mr. Boorman writes of his teacher and mentor John Maquire who encouraged the sixteen year old to pursue becoming a writer. John's mother then bought him a used typewriter. "where I sat every night tapping away with two fingers, a bottle of Tipp-Ex at hand" He would go on to have some success publishing some short stories. This yearning for story telling would soon find another way of expression and become the major driving pursuit of John Boorman's life.

In the opening pages we read about when John begin to make movies on Super 8 with his school friend Barry Vince."This was our fantasy. Film-making was a distant dream and occupied by people who went to Oxford." These pages took me back to my high school days and making films with my friend John Harvey and our VHS cameras. Running around our hometown as gangsters and suffering artists. Our movies were first inspired by John Woo, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. As we continued our films became more personal and more art-house with our love for grindhouse still embedded in our short films.

A notable early passage where Mr. Boorman speaks about beginning to make the film The Emerald Forrest and living with indigenous people of the Xingu region of the Amazon rain forrest and how the tribe sees themselves as part of the greater whole rather than seperate beings and how our fixation on individuality can be alienating. As I reading through these particular pages I was thinking of the current moment of time we are all sharing amidst the spread of COVID-19. Of the need to collectively wear masks in public that do not necessarily protect us but to protect the other people we will come into contact with. Mr. Boorman takes this philosophy and applies it to making a film. "However clear your vision , you cannot make a movie on your own. You need a tribe. As a director you struggle to communicate to the cast and crew the essential nature of the film you are making. If things go well , there comes a magical moment when they 'get' what you are trying to achieve. From that moment, the film makes itself.' I was thinking of how the film-making process will be altered as time moves forward in the new era of the cornavirus Another exceptionally strong section for me personally was when Mr. Boorman takes us through his personal film school. Sections on writing, rehearsals with actors, another section on shot selection which will be a section I revisit often.

As I read Conclusions there were many times I had the feeling as though I was sitting by a fireplace in Wicklow Hills, Ireland across from Mr. Boorman as we spent an evening drinking scotch as I listened to his stories of film-making, life and friendships and family as well as his affinity for water and trees. As I was nearing the end of the book it really felt as though I was privy to a very private and intimate conversation with a person who is very much more than the films that brought me to this book. Mr. Boorman is clearly preparing for the end of a life lived. He has outlived many of his film-making contemporaries as well as losing friends and family. His words convey a sense of peace as well as preparing for death. He is still very much driven by imagination and curiosity of our shared existence and the planet we currently call home. As I read the last words of Conclusions there is a hint of regret in Mr. Boorman's words that so much of his time was spent in the pursuit of making films. Ultimately it is the life we have lived which is of utmost importance. Life is about the friends and family the precede us to the other side and the friends and family we leave behind. May our stories live well after us.