I Don't Want to Talk About It.
Movie review by Karen Jaehne.
Review Grade: A
Full Text: COPYRIGHT Regents of the University of California 1994
. If Buñuel had been a
woman, he might have made I Don't Want to Talk About It
(De eso no se habla), but would he
have engendered controversy over his feminism? The feminist who
did direct it, Argentinian
Maria Luisa Bemberg, wears the Buñuel mantle lightly,
but has been hit by friendly fire from
feminists for her vision of woman as dwarf. Indeed, I Don't
Want to Talk About It reflects such
a complex view of mothers, daughters, freaks, artists, and decadents--without
coming to any
happy or definitive statement--that we are forced to talk about
it and all the things it says we
don't want to discuss. In an Age of Political Correctness, Bemberg
challenges our beliefs in
assimilation, shows us the absurdity of suppressed speech, and
rebukes a society in which only
men can be tolerated as outsiders. And she takes on freaks. She
traps us between denial and
voyeurism.
When Bemberg declares that her film must be understood as a fable
or fairy tale and in the next
breath claims it as her most autobiographical work, you need
to know that Bemberg was brought
up in a stiflingly proper and wealthy Argentinian family, married,
and raised four children
before she broke out, divorced, began writing screenplays in
197 1, and debuted as a director in
1981 at the age of 56. In 1984, her elegant historical love story,
Camila,
received an Oscar
nomination for Best Foreign Film. She was a success by artistic
standards, but she had lost the
position she once enjoyed in the innermost circle of Argentina's
elite, where respectable women
were neither workers nor artists. And she is harshly criticized
(particularly by the Church) as an
artist and frequently ostracized as a mad feminist. "But I don't
like talking about it," she finds
herself saying, laughing at herself, then explaining, "It's not
the interesting part of my life."
By its title alone, I Don't Want to Talk About It cleverly
forces us out of the denial it proclaims
for its subject. It is the story of a widow who will not acknowledge
that her only child will never
"grow up." Set in a South American town where the locals drift
into a kind of collusion with the
mother's denial, the film moves through the points-of-view of
the three protagonists with subtlety
and tolerance of their extreme differences. Carlotta is a dwarf
in a society hidebound by
normalcy. The telling achondroplastic features of a dwarf do
not age in the usual sense; although
we watch her "grow up," Carlotta is forever young. The intrinsic
danger here is that we, the
viewers, continue to see her as a child and commit the same mistake
as her loved ones--from
whom she must escape in order to enjoy any kind of autonomy.
We enter the fictional San Jose de los Altares (filmed in the
historic old city of Colonia on the
Uruguayan shore opposite Buenos Aires) on Carlotta's fifth birthday.
Her mother, Leonor, is
giving her a party. As the camera pans the faces of the other
mothers, caricatures in exaggerated
1930s hats and prim expressions, their whispers and averted gazes
betray the potential for scandal
in a colonial backwater. And when one woman, who is herself the
mother of a deafmute child,
tries to sympathize with Leonor, Leonor distances herself from
any such "recognition" of
Carlotta's deformation. Although Bemberg utilizes a village priest
to his full comic and dramatic
potential, she never touches on superstitions that used to see
in a deformed child some form of
divine retribution on the mother; or an even earlier association
of dwarfism with witchcraft and
devilry. An amusing social defiance marks Leonor's motherhood:
late at night she purges the
town of every symbol that might reflect her daughter, destroying
a neighbor's garden dwarfs and
burning children's books about little people.
Leonor perfects her imperfect child in every possible way, giving
Carlotta a prodigious education
and cultivating her musical and linguistic talents so that she
is living proof that Leonor is a
perfect mother. The child learns French so well--the very measure
of civilization--that she
prefers to be called "Charlotte." Voila, her transformation is
complete. She becomes such an
exemplary product of bourgeois ideals that her physical otherness
seems trivial. By the end of the
first act, we are ready to side with Leonor for insisting on
her daughter's normalcy.
Charlotte is so accomplished that when her mother arranges for
her to perform a piano recital (to
the horror of other mothers), Charlotte acquits herself of the
task elegantly. But it is here that we
see the seeds of defiance. Leonor advises Charlotte to be already
seated on the piano bench when
the curtain rises. But the child proudly prances on stage, minces
as any young girl would, scales
the piano bench, and demonstrates that Schumann is impervious
to size. She has learned more
from her independent-minded mother than Leonor may have intended.
Enter Ludovico D'Andrea, man of the world, an Italian, and an
outsider capable of seeing
Charlotte as someone who, like himself, exists apart from the
crowd. In the scenes of them
together, the camera is restless until the inevitable close-up
of Charlotte's wide-eyed trust.
Ludovico tells her of faraway places and she listens avidly,
accepting his every tale and fantasy.
Marcello Mastroianni in the role of eligible bachelor appeals
to all the women in town (nor can
the audience forget Mastroianni's stock-in-trade as cinema's
most ambivalent seducer).
Leonor turns to Ludovico when she needs help in getting her daughter
a birthday present--a horse.Ludovico brings back a Shetland pony, and Leonor
erupts: the mini-horse nearly breaks the taboo of silence. Ludovico apologetically
backtracks and gives Charlotte a beautiful palomino. In a world of magical
realism, it is this white horse, this Pegasus, that endows sexuality and
empowers Charlotte. In many ways,Ludovico plays her liberator, and that
he gives her the
horse rather than riding in on it himself deftly foreshadows the way
she will, in the end, ride off with the circus.
His first sight of the girl training the horse stirs an uncontrollable
passion in Ludovico. He attempts to flee her power over him, but some indeterminate
number of years later, he returns to ask for her hand in marriage.This
request sends her mother, the priest, and the entire
town into fits of objection. Charlotte's response, however, has
no giddy nervousness about it. In her quiet, self-possessed way, she accepts.
The old mayor, who is to give the girl away, dies in the
middle of the marriage ceremony--threatening to foil Leonor's
ambitions. But with the help of
her shop assistant, she packs the body in ice, so as to keep
the death a secret until the next day.
There is no obstacle Leonor cannot overcome in order to present
her daughter as perfection.
(Leonor's power of denial is surpassed by that of the film's
publicists, who had no photos made of
Alejandra Podesta, who plays Charlotte, lest we learn the "secret"
of the movie.) When the
musicians announce that it is time for the bride and groom to
dance, we cut to Leonor's grim
reaction--yet another obstacle for her, and we share her panic.
But Mastroianni saves the moment
by lifting little Charlotte up to his height as he swirls her
away. It is a mystical moment of
wedding dress and white sand and blazing light as they leave
the wedding guests and embark on
the great adventure of marriage. At once romantic and sly, this
scene plays out the archetypal
happy ending with a sleight of hand learned from Fellini. It's
only the end of the second act;
could this be love?
The fetishization of the dwarf is an inevitable risk of a picture
like this, and Bemberg steers a
discreet course around it. She makes it quite clear that Charlotte
herself is a sexual creature: the
young girl prances before a mirror; we see flirtation in her
eyes; the palomino is the symbol of
her sexual prowess. Mastroianni's love is the linchpin of the
fairy tale that Charlotte is a full,
complete woman with a psyche as strong as an Amazon.
Yet we never hear much from the object of desire. Is her silence
that of the town, whose speech
has been supressed by Leonor? Or is she keeping the peace until
the right moment? Bemberg
comments on the girl's passivity by citing the French critic
Roland Barthes' observation that "the
amorous object never talks." "I thought that was quite interesting,"
notes Bemberg, "to have the
girl like a catalyst to make his story appear. And I gave my
character the name of Charlotte, the
object of Werther's love in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther."
Most of Charlotte's
dialogue is given over to questions in which she explores others
(most deftly when she asks her
mother if she's thought of marrying Ludovico herself). Yet the
girl's silence is not sadness, nor
even, I would argue, resignation. It seems much more the reticence
of someone with the faith that
freedom is something gained in stages rather than revolutions.
Someone like Maria Luisa
Bemberg. For women who have lived both kinds of lives, this metaphor
is not as offensive as for
women born liberated.
I Don't Want to Talk About It is also a film about getting
out from under the thumb of a
well-intentioned mother in order to claim one's individual identity.
A dedication is scrawled
across the screen over the opening of the film, declaring its
intention: "This tale is dedicated to all
people who have the courage to be different in order to be themselves."
A physical deformity,
however, is not the same as a talent or a gift. It might be flattering
to make the parallel between
physically challenged people and the artist, and there's no reason
any individual dwarf would not
be as sensitive or talented as any particular artist, but there
is a definite temerity in comparing a
physical handicap to a social or psychological condition.
The separate reality of "freaks," known to us previously in Werner
Herzog's Even Dwarfs Start
Small or Todd Browning's Freaks, or in the characters played
by the actor Michael Dunne, is the
source of the discomfort created by the film. Carlotta is a dwarf,
and moreover, "the end" is not
the end of the story. The woman who plays Carlotta, Alejandra
Podesta, is not a Meryl Streep
with a good accent, but a non-actress who lives and works in
Buenos Aires. Her achondro-plastic
image is on the screen more than half the time, and we have ample
opportunity to measure her
humanity against her freakiness. And tenderness outdistances
any quality that could be exploited
by P.T. Barnum.
"I suppose," Bemberg speculates, "if the film had been directed
by Bunuel or Fellini, it would
probably have been much funnier. And maybe more ferocious. But
I never wanted to make fun
of her. Art and ethics go hand in hand. It would have been wrong
to be cruel with this young
girl, who was doing her very best to make her first movie, and
in which reality and fiction are so
painfully criss-crossed. She finishes at the end of her day and
goes back to her poor little house
with her lonely mother. And she still is the character, still
a little dwarf. I was very maternal with her. I still am."
The final sequence begins with the fictional mother tending her
husband's gravestone. As we
watch her polish his plaque, we can't help but reflect on how
well she has managed her mission to
steer her daughter into a moribund society. Leonor's will and
power are impressive; but fate is
impervious to human design, and in the distance we hear the caterwaul
of trumpets and drums.
(This inimitable circus sound cannot be heard without thinking
of Fellini's 8 1/2, a daunting
comparison to invoke in the final flourishes of a movie.
Bemberg doesn't even take us inside the circus, a decision that
maintains the "silence" imposed by
Leonor, who forbids her daughter to attend the circus. At this
point it is not only suppression of
expression and freedom; it is "structured absence." We are forced
to consider what in the circus
could change Charlotte: a caged lion? a trapeze artist? a midget
act? It is no particular person or
thing, of course, but the circus as a concept. This is the place
where Leonor would least like to
see her daughter, because any possible comparison with a freak
of nature would be in bad taste. A "mother's instinct," as she calls it,
warns her of an unknown hand that could claim an unknown
part of her daughter.
The shocking loss of a closely watched maiden is the driving mechanism
of Demeter and
Persephone, Madame de Volange and Cecile (Les Liaisons Dangereuses),
Eliane and Camille
(Indochine), or Cocteau's Orpheus. The mythic tenor of the film's
final sequence is reinforced by
a narrator describing the marriage of Ludovico and Charlotte:
"Time went by slowly, like that
which is forever." When Charlotte slips from bed and we see her
in the darkness of the circus
grounds, moving stealthily but surely among the tents, wagons,
and cages, there is no doubt she is
at home. Another achondroplastic face is seen dimly in the half-light;
although it is not clearly a
dwarf, it smiles and welcomes her.
"Running away with the circus" is not just the classic escape;
the circus is for Charlotte a place
where whatever she is, she is the norm. The malformations of
the circus can be a mirror of our
"secret self," as Fellini intended in his pageantry of ever-present
freaks. Bemberg wisely refrains
from speculating on the potential lurch into melodrama and only
shows Charlotte riding away on
her white horse, wearing a crown. The paradox is that the less
said, the more metaphoric and less
pathetic is the creature.
General Tom Thumb, who was a Connecticut Yankee put on display
in the English court of
Victoria and Albert, wrote, "God has given me a small body, but
I believe He has not contracted
my heart, nor brain, nor soul...." Given the rich tradition of
little people, what's not to talk
about? Speech insists on Charlotte's reality; silence is the
secret to the poetry of a Charlotte.
Bemberg has made a film that makes us choose.
* Karen Jaehne has finished her first novel, Unpopular Positions.