Blessed?

Like several films I have seen this year, Blessed begins with images of people sleeping. The faces of the seven teenagers at rest, some in their own beds, one sprawled amongst a few sleeping bodies and two children who are asleep under a bridge. Watching, I thought how rarely I see anyone asleep except the cat. It’s a rare intimacy – the unguarded softened face at rest.

The central theme of this film is the connection between mothers and their children and this plays out in the division of the film. The opening half focuses on the children and is shot in tight close-ups. The latter half is called ‘Mothers’ and the camera angle widens; we see more of each family’s context, both literally and metaphorically.

I wanted to like this film. It’s set in the western suburbs of Melbourne though there are few actual markers of this landscape (Noise, released a couple of years ago, conveyed the physical landscape the west much more potently, as did the film My Year Without Sex, though what these film makers choose to show is quite different). So it’s set in the place I have lived the greater part of my life and focuses on the lives of teenagers. I’ve spent a lot of time with teenagers from the West. I was deeply interested in how filmmaker Ana Kokkinos would represent these things.

The theme is also powerful; Kokkinos talks about ‘that connection between them (mothers and children) is primal, so powerful, and no matter what shit’s going down, at the end of the day there’s that incredible capacity to return to the mother’s embrace.’ And there’s one extended scenes which shows this; involving the Miranda Otto character Bianca and her daughter Stacey. Stacey has been in trouble (I won’t describe what it is) and her mother opens the front door of their house to discover both her daughter and a policewoman. Later, as she shuts the door, she gives Stacey a complicit smile. “I did this once, she says”. It’s a response that should have come after a parental blast about bad behaviour but Bianca is half-pissed and not capable of reacting appropriately. Then later that night, Stacey opens the door of her mother’s bedroom, her mother lifts the doona and Stacey snuggles in next to her mum. Shit goes down, shit is forgiven. It feels real, this scene.

A lot of the film failed to persuade. I think two things were happening. The actors were just a tad too middle class in presentation (teenage girls with perfect skin, neutral middle class accents, delivering lines without the almost essential uplift at the end of each sentence – that badge of teenage girl uncertainty that haunts most kids I know. Drinking bourbon straight. No sign of even getting a bit giggly on it). I wasn’t convinced that they inhabited the same train line as I do. And the other problem with the film is that the large amount of intersecting plot lines means that we never develop a strong sense of any of the personalities. You could sum each character and what happens to them in one or two sentences without omitting much information. Not that this always matters. One of the best films I saw at MIFF this year was Treeless Mountain where there is a similar sparseness of information and plot development. It’s a film about the reverse issue to Blessed; about a mother who effectively abandons her very young children. But in the case of that film, we live through the pain of the young sisters by seeing events at their level, experiencing their attempts to survive and care for each other in a slow and careful script which allows the viewer to spend time with the character. Blessed felt like a gallery of semi-one dimensional “issues”.

The most interesting and believable character in the film is Rhonda (Frances O’Connor). Her young kids leave home and sleep rough for reasons which become obvious in the film. All her scenes are interesting but we find out so little about her that she seems short-changed. If I described what happens to her in the film, it would seem like a paragraph from the Herald Sun about no-hoper mothers and tragedies. Kokkinos is quoted as saying that the screenplay for the film would not hang together until she went back to the core of what attracted her in the first place: a powerful monologue in which single mother Rhonda describes her missing and neglected kids as her “blessings”. “Of all the words in the play, they resonated with me most the first time I saw it,” says Kokkinos. “If you can imagine that, as a filmmaker, there are a couple of key lines in a film that actually continue to hook you in and provide you with an emotional core to keep going, over years, no matter what.” It is a powerful moment in the film but the film goes nowhere with it. We get no further handle on Rhonda. Almost none of her behaviour is in sync with the notion that her children are her blessings yet we get little opportunity to understand why. She’s lost in a kind of film limbo and seems unfair.

I am biased. The films I have come to love emerge from the Neo-Neo Realism school of film-making. In a great article on this genre, writer A O Scott talks about the aftermath of 9/11 and other unsettling global events and what audiences therefore might be been looking for. He/she argues that, rather than necessarily wanting escapism as many pundits thought,

"what if, at least some of the time, we feel an urge to escape from escapism? For most of the past decade, magical thinking has been elevated from a diversion to an ideological principle. The benign faith that dreams will come true can be hard to distinguish from the more sinister seduction of believing in lies. To counter the tyranny of fantasy entrenched on Wall Street and in Washington as well as in Hollywood, it seems possible that engagement with the world as it is might reassert itself as an aesthetic strategy. Perhaps it would be worth considering that what we need from movies, in the face of a dismaying and confusing real world, is realism.”

I guess that many people would argue that realism pervades Blessed. But none of the characters got the time they deserved on screen so they melted into a sort of working class pastiche. A O Scott describes a number of films which fall into the category of Neo-Neo Realism and goes on to say that they serve as an antidote to the wish-fulfilment films of Hollywood.

“Not because they offer grim counsels of despair or paint lurid tableaux of desperation but rather because they take what has always seemed seductively easy about moviemaking — the camera can show us the world — and make it look hard. Their characters undergo a painful process of disillusionment, and then keep going. The disappointment they encounter — the grit with which they face it, the grace with which it is conveyed — becomes, for the audience, a kind of exhilaration.”

The ambitious scope of Blessed allows for neither grit or grace to stick around for long.