Worth: $19.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Chloe Abrahams, Rozana, Nana Jean
Intro:
… weaves a spellbinding portrait of love and perseverance.
The first image that appears on screen is a gossamer closeup of a woman’s face, as another younger woman speaks in voiceover. The narrator describes how the thought of her mother has become intertwined with the taste of mango, and the Proustian memories of childhood mango-eating that come flooding back when she thinks of her. We will soon learn that the woman speaking is the filmmaker, Chloe Abrahams, and the diaphanous woman on screen, her mother Rozana.
The Taste of Mango’s opening moments visually and aurally draw attention to something the film will, over the course of its duration, continually prod and probe: skin. As Abrahams viscerally describes tearing into a mango, peeling back its membrane to reveal its sweet flesh, the close camera work highlights the surface of Rozana’s face and the lines around her eyes that harbour decades of pain.
Abrahams’ gorgeously personal documentary, shot almost entirely on a low-resolution camcorder, employs the aesthetics of home video to explore the relationship between herself, her Sri Lankan mother, and her maternal grandmother Nana Jean. The film is deeply interested in skin’s many symbolic functions. Indeed, the film itself seems to possess a skin, with its homely, granular texture. Yet, Abrahams refuses to linger on the surface, swiftly delving into the murky waters of her complex, sometimes strained, family dynamic.
We discover through a series of confessional interviews that Rozana was sexually abused by her stepfather as a child and that Jean has remained married to him since. During these interviews, Rozana describes how her stepfather beat, bruised and wounded her body, as skin comes to expose the immense vulnerability of the human form. Later, we watch Rozana and Abrahams gaze at themselves in a mirror while Rozana dyes her hair and Abrahams films. In voiceover, Abrahams points out the similarities between her smile and her mother’s, the mirror reflecting their matching complexions and bright mouths. Here, Abrahams expertly deploys skin as a nebulous, shifting metaphor, now coming to signify the familial bond between mother and child.
Much of the film’s charm derives from Abrahams’ close relationship with her subjects. The camera is always physically near the women, often so close it seems that their skin will make contact with the lens. More significant though, is Abrahams’ intimate emotional connection to her mother, deliberately erasing the men of her family from the film (her stepfather has been ripped from photo albums) in order to heighten the almost-magical sense of closeness we feel towards Rozana. Abrahams paints Rozana in tender detail, depicting her love of country music (Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man” features in one scene to devastating effect), and her flair for costume parties alongside her most private struggles.
While The Taste of Mango laments the suffering endured by its three central characters, it also celebrates their remarkable bravery and resilience. They bleed and cry, but they also smile and sing, and manage to find ways of coping, forgiving, and escaping. Through her investigative but affectionate style of filmmaking, Abrahams brings the viewer face-to-face with the women of her family and, in the process, weaves a spellbinding portrait of love and perseverance.
