Film: Irene’s Ghost/Iain Cunningham at the London Film Festival

Happy days

Ok I have to admit that when the film started, I had a sinking feeling. Oh no, not one of those documentaries along the lines of Nick Broomfield/Jacques Peretti where there’s a toneless narration by the film-maker/subject, expressing no emotion at all. But this turns out to be a false first impression. Plus I’d expected the film to be American (poor research on my part) because, I’ve worked out, of the image in the programme of the director and his mother in which they both looked perfect and perfectly happy and so rather unBritish. I’m glad I assumed wrong though because I may have felt less intrigued by a British documentary (see above) and chosen something else and it would have been my loss.

Then there’s the initial focus on the adorable poppet of a daughter and the assertion that it was only when Iain Cunningham had his own child that he became determined to unravel the mystery surrounding his mother, Irene. I have a problem with the notion that only when you become a parent do you acquire empathy with, compassion for or curiosity about your own parents.

‘And watching my own child grow through her early years helped me see the impact my loss had on me. A three-year-old has a huge capacity for love.’

This implies he's more concerned with how the loss of his mother affected the child he was, although it's probable she only existed as a vague idea in his head as he was very young when she died, than what caused her disappearance. His father did what he thought was best for both of them at the time, he remarried and his wife, June, became to all intents and purposes, Iain’s mother so let's hear it for June, may she rest in peace.

With these misgivings, it’s remarkable how soon and how easily the film won me round. Here's the trailer.

Iain and his father

Iain starts his brave undertaking by interrogating his relatives, encountering some initial reluctance particularly on the part of his father. Undeterred, he sets about knocking on doors, following clues and meeting his mother’s friends, who share many fond and sometimes quite detailed recollections of Irene and their collective past, for instance, of her sitting on a gate singing ‘King of the Road’ by Roger Miller. Their memories bring her alive. It appears she was well loved and one friend in particular, Lynn, is demonstrably glad of the chance to reminisce about the best friend who no one ever mentions now, who she lost so long ago. There’s a very real sense of sadness and confusion over what happened and why.

The extreme close-ups on the interviewees’ faces mirror and exacerbate for the viewer the discomfort they feel in talking about an awkward subject.

Gradually we come to realise that Irene was hospitalised after the birth of her son, then allowed out for a while (when the gloriously happy picture was taken) then rehospitalised when her illness recurred. There’s an unspoken consensus that it was some physical complication during childbirth that led to Irene’s death, a heavy burden for a child to carry and so a very good reason to keep a secret. Iain gains some insight when he finds his baby book in amongst some old boxes of photos. There are strange scrawlings about God, baby, etc., not exactly the pride and joy a new mother might express. This suggests that there was something awry with Irene’s thought processes.

Lynn and Irene

We learn that when Lynn went to visit Irene in hospital (which she didn’t first time around because she and other friends were led to believe that Irene was in a coma, the truth being unsayable), Irene didn’t recognise her and had started seeing things that weren’t there, becoming paranoid and loud, acting out of character.

Even when Irene is at home, she doesn’t feel the same, saying ‘I’m not Irene, you know, I’m Irene’s ghost.’ And there’s no doubt that to her family she must have seemed like a different person.

As was common in those days, any hint of mental instability was hushed up. It turns out that Irene suffered from post-partum psychosis (as it is called today) that led her to behave in a way that would have been quite frightening to all who knew her.

When the psychosis returned, she was readmitted to hospital and died soon after. Her death certificate records the cause of death as ‘cardiac arrest’. No one seems to question – maybe it’s too difficult (and certainly too late) to consider – whether the electric shock treatment she was given affected her heart.

So Iain’s persistence pays off and the film’s slow reveal helps us to comprehend the true horror of what happened to Irene.

It’s quite probable that Iain’s father felt guilt, fear, confusion and helplessness when faced with something that no one really had any idea about (not even the doctors), that even today carries a stigma, that people felt could (and should) not be talked about.

Symptoms of post-partum psychosis usually start suddenly within the first two weeks after giving birth. More rarely, they can develop several weeks after the baby is born and include hallucinations, delusions, mania, depression, loss of inhibitions, paranoia, restlessness, confusion, out of character behaviour.

BFI London Film Festival 2018

The film, as well as being an investigation into the mystery behind Irene’s death and her complete eradication from their family history, also acts to rehabilitate her memory, so that she can take her place in the lives of her descendants, as a vital, normal, caring young woman who suffered an illness that inevitably hastened her end but need not define her.

Irene's Ghost is profoundly affecting. Many of us were in tears by the end. And you can't say better than that. Art should move you. I hope that the producer, Rebecca Mark-Lawson is able to procure a wider release as this sensitive film raises awareness about a devastating condition that is still not in common parlance. It deserves to be seen by as many people as possible.

Film: Three Peaks (at the London Film Festival 2017)

Three Peaks

You know a film is good when you’re still talking about it several days later. So it was with Three Peaks, directed by Jan Zalbein which I saw at the London Film Festival. [Incidentally I noticed an ad for the 'Face to Face with German Film' campaign in the LFF programme but no further details were given. Is it coming to the UK?] However, I was still a little worried that the film might be a dud simply because it was a three-hander, featuring a child. Occasionally, and this is particularly true of British cinema, you get a child in a movie who cannot act at all, for instance, the kids in Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe et al.). We Brits seem to demand nothing of child actors (beyond speaking their lines in the right order) and consequently we get nothing (or less in the case of Harry Potter) while the US has a history of high expectations and correspondingly high achievers from the 1970s to the 2000s, from Tatum O'Neal in Paper Moon, Justin Henry in Kramer vs Kramer, the ubiquitous Jodie Foster, Henry Thomas in ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, through Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense and AI: Artificial Intelligence to Jacob Tremblay in Room, not to mention Dakota and Elle Fanning in almost everything else. I’m relieved to say this is not the case with Three Peaks. Arian Montgomery, who plays eight-year-old Tristan, is a revelation. Entirely believable in every scene; you immediately empathise with his stepfather Aaron’s desire to connect with him.

This film is about identity, love, parenthood, fractured families and the effect the last has on all involved. It depicts the predicament of the new man in a mother's life, illustrating how he performs the father role in all but name, depended upon, even taken for granted by the child, sharing in all the labour and reward of raising the boy and, from the opening scene, it seems, completely accepted. And we also see it from the boy’s point of view, in which Aaron is the interloper in his family, having usurped his father (whose presence is established by regular phone calls), all complicated by Tristan’s own guilt for occasionally preferring Aaron to his father.

Carrie and Jonas/Homeland

Alexander Fehling, who was very good in Homeland, in which, coincidentally, he also had to play father figure to someone else’s child, the daughter that Carrie (Claire Danes) has with Brodie (Damian Lewis) although his role is secondary to the main storyline (for more on Homeland, see secretsquirrelshorts), is the easy to identify with Aaron, who has to negotiate the tightrope of this awkward situation, in which he is asked to be a father but never be called a father, in which he plays second fiddle to the whims and wishes of a wilful and demanding but sometimes incredibly charming eight-year-old, and has to handle the pressure put upon him by Lea (played by Bérénice Bejo, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Natalie Wood) who wants to be fair to her child, his father and her new man. Aaron is frequently tripped up (dangerous on a tightrope), courted and betrayed by both.

Lea, Tristan, Aaron

The rather cosseted Tristan continually tests the boundaries, crossing the line between mischief and malice. He can be deliberately and casually affectionate and just as deliberately and casually cruel. Realising that he’s a king in his court, he wields his power accordingly, bestowing and withdrawing his trust randomly, so that poor Aaron is forever placating him in order to gain his favour, scavenging for crumbs at the table. But what the boy gives with one hand, he takes back with the other, pulling him towards him as he pushes him away. Loved and resented in equal measure, with Tristan revealing himself to be capable of minor violence, Aaron is in a quandary. Should he come down hard or brush it off? He opts to ignore it.

'Papa'

Aware that he holds all the cards, Tristan toys with Aaron, who’s begun to see him as his own son, and undoubtedly loves him, by calling him ‘Papa’ just to see how it feels and what the reaction will be – poor Aaron is beguiled and grateful, happily reporting it to the mother only for her to disapprove – he should have made it clear that he’s not Tristan’s father because Tristan already has a father and this might confuse him. The unfortunate Aaron is in a no-win situation here. If he had said ‘Don’t call me Papa’ I can well imagine the tantrums that might have resulted. From mother and son.

In danger

Repeatedly offered an ultimatum by Tristan, as their circumstances become more desperate, and the man's situation more precarious, Aaron, like the people who attended the film’s screening cannot conceive that a child would resort to something much more dangerous and violent in order to force a return to the status quo. It's shocking but suddenly, because of the way it's played, also totally credible.

(Stop reading now if you haven't yet seen the movie)

The ending is cleverly ambiguous. At one point, I was reminded of the scene in Before the Fall (Napola) when the character runs out of options and chooses to sacrifice himself. The director realised that such an outcome might prove unpalatable to some audiences (and such it proved at the LFF, where they chose to believe in the innocence and innate goodness of the child despite all evidence to the contrary). We were allowed to come to our own conclusions. We were allowed to hope.

At the time of viewing, Three Peaks had yet to acquire a UK distributor, which is a real shame. It definitely deserves to be seen.