Reel Life: Family is where the love is

Spencer, Pablo Larrain’s feverish journey into the troubled mind of Diana, Princess of Wales, is anchored beautifully in the lead performance by Kristin Stewart. The film, streaming on BookMyShow Stream, is poised perfectly between artistic flourishes and a profound portrayal of fragility.

Stewart, a frontrunner for the best actress Oscar, is spell-binding as Diana and not just for the typical tilt of the neck, or that look in the eye that she manages to capture but more: the lost girl that she is on the way to the Queen’s Sandringham Estate for the royal Christmas holidays, hating the heating at the mansion, habitually late for just about every event, resenting the hoary traditions, playing along the media glare publicly but struggling with bulimia in the privacy of the bathroom, trusting no one but just a few members of the staff, specially the royal dresser Maggie and, most of all, being unable to separate the public from the private.

Spencer captures her on the precipice, haunted by Anne Boleyn nightmares even as she hears “all rumours of my disintegration” after almost a decade of becoming the Princess of Wales.

However, what struck me most, tucked away in the hallucinatory narrative and proclaimed aloud in the title, is essentially the tale of a woman stuck between families. One that she was born to, feels a belongingness for but had to leave behind and the other that she had to adopt and embrace because of her marriage but still feels alienated in.

It’s a family that doesn’t quite acknowledge her as an individual, where she feels burdened with responsibility for the country than herself, where everything is defined, right down to her “all set” wardrobe and where her own marriage is collapsing yet somehow held together. It’s a family where life appears to be staged than lived.

Diana longs for little pieces of her childhood and youth—Bertie, the scarecrow wearing her father’s coat, and her childhood home, Park House, which she is prevented from entering by the royal guards. “Fight them. You are your own weapon,” Maggie advises her.

She avoids the formal Christmas dinner and gains access to the parental estate, only to be swamped with the memories of the carefree days when she used to pirouette there as the ballerina.

“What you need is love and laughter,” Maggie tells her. “Just let her be. That’s all she wants,” says another member of the staff. And so, the film ends on Boxing Day with Diana breaking the pearl necklace that binds her and trying do her own thing— taking the sons William and Henry away from the royal pheasant shoot to a life less ordinary. A life that is about fast food and long drives in the car, singing “All I need is a miracle; all I need is you”.

Spencer is all about reclaiming your true self by a return to the family fold. The Princess of Wales going back to being a Spencer.

Coincidentally, families, dysfunctional ones at that, have been at the core of many a film and series that I ended up watching this week. The Netflix series, Maid, inspired by Stephanie Land’s ‘Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive’, is about the trials of mothers and daughters.

Centred on a single mother’s interminable struggles to make ends meet for herself and her three-year-old daughter, it brings abusive relationships and marriages under the microscope, the estrangements in which women, most often, end up paying a heavy price. As does young Alex (Margaret Qualley), who must deal with the ghosts of her past, let go of her ambition of becoming a writer and fight for government subsidies, her rightful compensation on the job, the custody of her child Maddy as well as keep an eye on her mother who is dealing with mental health issues. She triumphs and runs free eventually, and not without her daughter at that.

I was particularly struck by a conversation that a rich client Regina has with Alex on her own failed attempts at conceiving, going for a child through surrogacy—one woman with the egg, one with womb and another with money coming together—only to find her husband walking out on their marriage on Thanksgiving Day. “It’s people you think you know that you have to worry about,” she says. For an empowered woman, who could spend $300,000 to bring a child to life, she confesses not feeling “loved”, just “desperate”. She advises Alex to not let anyone take advantage of her and her hard work.

Alex, on the other hand, realises that the extravagant lives we covet from a distance could actually be lacking in a lot of things. The huge closets could be like hiding places, the shining glass doors and windows a reflection of own loneliness and you could end up losing yourself in big houses.

Her dream is to have a space for herself and Maddy, however small, that is truly a home “because we love each other in it”.

A home with a tragic past becomes a playground for the present-day uneasy bond between a mother and son (Revathi and Shane Nigam) in Rahul Sadasivan’s Malayalam film Bhoothakalam (SonyLIV). While both are disintegrating within themselves as individuals, the relationship is collapsing under the weight of debts, financial instability, mental health issues, alcoholism, unemployment.

“In my family there are problems always,” says the son, while the mother is advised by the therapist to not hurt herself by overthinking. Ironically, the hauntings from the past that play out like mind games and overwhelm them with dread, also help them confront and communicate their own fears about each other—the child’s fear of not being understood by the parent, the mother’s fear that the child might end up making the same mistakes as she did and destroy his own life like his dad did.

“Will you stand by me,” he asks. “Who have I lived my life for,” she questions him back, rhetorically. And a family gets reconciled even as a house gets left behind.

Jared Bush and Byron Howards’ musical animation Encanto (Hotstar) is a reassertion of the familiar family values. Colombian Madrigal family is in the danger of losing its miraculous gifts that had helped it serve the Encanto community. It’s left for Mirabel, the only one of them to have been denied the spells and powers, to find out the secret of the rot that is setting in slowly and steadily.

Why are cracks appearing in the house and why is the keeper of the family—the candle—flickering? Are the prejudices and burdens that each one of them harbours the reason for the erosion? Will acceptance of individual responsibility, understanding others and togetherness and collectivism help them in starting all over again from the scratch? The obvious metaphor of strength in togetherness could not have been conveyed more colourfully.

However, it’s the Swedish series on Netflix—Anxious People—that marks a new paradigm shift when it comes to how we choose to define and understand the notion of a family. An attempt at bank robbery backfires. The robber then ends up holding a group of people hostage who have all come for an open house/viewing of a flat they are looking to buy.

A team of cops—father and son—go about investigating the case, questioning, and examining each of the hostages to try and zoom in on the identity of the robber who has gone missing. Based on the book by the same name by Fredrik Backman, it took me back, in an odd way, to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. All individuals are troubled, all relationships are either dead, dysfunctional or under threat, including the father-son cop duo that has an estranged daughter/sister to deal with.

However, in a steady build up to the twist in the tale, the series underscores the necessity for showing care, concern and empathy towards fellow human beings, not just those you consider your own because of the shared blood relation. It’s about how a sense of solidarity and community feeling could help protect and strengthen the frail and the vulnerable in our midst.

Families may not necessarily be the ones you are born in and inherit but those that you create and nurture as you move forward in life. Families are not biological. They are built on a foundation of feeling.

(This article was first published in National Herald on Sunday)