Sam Moore looks to recent cinematic releases centred on artists shaped by grief whose mourning is channeled into filmmaking and writing — efforts to hold onto what has already been lost.
“Build a memorial to him.” This is the advice given to Julie by Patrick, a fellow film student in The Souvenir Part II, the midpoint in a trio of autobiographical films by Joanna Hogg about grieving the end of two complex relationships: one between Julie and the enigmatic drug addict Anthony, and the other decades later, between Julie and her mother, Rosalind. In both The Souvenir and The Eternal Daughter – the final film in Hogg’s triptych, in which both the adult Julie and Rosalind are played by Tilda Swinton – Julie (played by Swinton’s daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne) attempts to create cinematic memorials to these pivotal people in her life. But the point in these films is the attempt being made, and the impossibility of truly capturing the past. In The Souvenir Part II, the film we see Julie making – a stark, kitchen-sink realism that recreates scenes from the first film – is very different from the final product: an experimental, impressionistic portrait that moves through genres and styles, from black and white noir to a vivid Hollywood music. It’s through this that the film seems to concede the impossibility of perfectly capturing the past, even as the camera is able to create something immortal and haunted: the same moments in time, the same memories, repeated ad infinitum.
Hamnet is Chloe Zhao’s much-anticipated adaptation of the novel by Maggie O’Farrell that tells the story of Shakespeare and his wife Agnes, the death of their son, and the genesis of Hamlet. The playwright – here described as just “Will,” no mystique or historical weight on his shoulders – and his beloved first meet in a forest, sitting on its earth and staring down into its sprawling depths. Agnes offers him a palm reading and tells him that she sees “the undiscovered country,” a metaphor for the afterlife that will return when Will writes his most famous tragedy, after suffering a tragic loss of his own. The two of them talk about poetry and myths, and Will tells Agnes the story of Orpheus and Eurydice – their perilous climb out of the underworld, the poet’s inability to stop himself from looking back. And of course, when the weight of tragedy becomes too much to bear, Will himself looks back – on his son, on himself – as Hamnet becomes Hamlet, two names, a title card tells us at the beginning of the film, that were seemingly interchangeable from one another at the time.
This idea of writing one’s way through and beyond grief is also at the core of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value: Gustav Borg, an ageing film-maker played by Stellan Skarsgård, returns to the home in which his marriage began and ended after his wife passes away, planning to shoot a film there that tells the story of his own mother’s suicide. Gustav’s impulse seems to be talked around in the film, rather than faced head-on in the way that it is in Hamnet. This loss came decades ago for Gustav, yet it still seems to linger over him, the memory of everything that led up to that moment so vivid in his mind: the way he was sent off to school, had to double back to get a flag (looking back again, that overpowering impulse that seems to be as much a condemnation as a promise), and how the door slammed shut behind him. When he talks about filming this scene, he insists that his mother’s final moments won’t be seen, just heard, with the camera lingering behind the closed door. It’s as if Gustav is, even in these moments, still unable to face the reality of what happened, pushing up against the limits of film as a way to capture this memory, this story. It becomes a kind of intergenerational mourning, as Gustav attempts to convince his daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve) to play the role of his mother. This idea is reflected in Hamnet; at the film’s climax, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is mounted at the Globe Theatre, and the writer himself takes on the role of the Ghost. As a bewildered, terrified Agnes watches on, it dawns on her that Will has used the play to change places with his lost son; Hamlet lives on in the wake of his father’s death. It’s an inversion of the arms-length distance that Gustav still has with his own grief. Will is mired in the depths of it, trying to find his way through it in the only way that seems possible: through art.
There’s a sense here that Will, Gustav, and Julie – all of them grieving writers and artists – are, like Orpheus (himself a poet and singer), always looking back in an attempt to remind themselves that there’s more than just an absence behind them, as if through making these memorials, they’re able to somehow make right this feeling of loss, stop the cameras from rolling just in time to save someone. In Hogg’s Eternal Daughter, a now-middle-aged Julie returns with her mother Rosalind to a hotel that used to be a family home. Julie confesses that she’s trying to make a film about the complex relationship that she had with her mother, something that Rosalind herself is also all too aware of. As Julie records the conversations she has with her mother, Rosalind says, “I suppose you’ll want to put this in one of your films.” Julie’s creative impulse, her desire to immortalise, is reflected back at her. But Hogg’s trilogy is driven by the impossibility of this action. Often when mother and daughter are in conversation, the camera adopts first-person perspectives, its eye in the place of one woman, looking at the other. And so, in the film’s most frightening, devastating moment, the camera cuts to a wide shot of the two women, mid-conversation, revealing nothing but an empty chair across from Julie; her attempt to fill in the absence of her mother is rendered impossible, even as the camera has the ability to immortalise her.
The point, then, is that these attempts to reanimate those that have been lost are illusory. Will won’t be able to play the Ghost in Hamlet forever; Gustav is unable to face head-on the loss of his mother – there’s a decisive “cut” called from out of shot before Nora steps onto a stool – turning these films, this play, this artistic impulse, into something that’s haunted. It’s tempting to think of cinema as a kind of immortality: even though these people left us long ago, they’re revived when a film reel starts flickering to life. But instead, these figures are haunted, ghosts, repeating the same movements and moments whenever they’re called on to do so. Instead, grieving through art becomes an open wound; a reminder not just of the pain of the loss, but how complex, non-linear, and messy the process of healing can be.
