This House (Miryam Charles, 2022) (Patreon)

There's a strange thing about "realism" that I've never quite understood. In many respects, the world we live in is cruel, ugly, and inhumane. And in the course of trying to protest against those conditions, a great many artists seek to replicate those conditions, or at least a close surface resemblance to them. I suppose the thinking is, by lifting situations out of the overall flow of things, and asking us to focus our undivided attention to them, we will be so moved by the duplicated pain and injustice that we will feel compelled to take some sort of action, to correct the horror that, presumably, eluded our notice.

Obviously I am skeptical about these assumptions, mostly because I think we are very capable of allowing other people's misery to wash over us, or perhaps using it to achieve some sort of catharsis that is, per Aristotle, more purgative than exhortatory. But I also look back on the works of art that have moved me the most over the course of my life, and I find that many of them refused to duplicate the violence of the world. Instead, they used the expansive capacities of their chosen medium to imagine a different world altogether, or to hypothetically undo the violence that they take as their subject.

These thoughts coalesced for me while watching This House, the debut feature by Miryam Charles. This is a film about the director's cousin, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, who was found dead in her home in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In the film she is called Tessa (Schelby Jean-Baptiste), a variation on her real name. Using minimal means, including black-box stage constructions and rear projections, Charles depicts the devastation of her mother Valeska (Florence Blain Mbaye), who somehow manages to continue living after this tragedy. But This House is a conjectural film, one that seeks not only to understand but to repair this unspeakable wound. We see the girl's mother and aunt identify the body and, in a gesture of protectiveness, Charles cuts the sound so that we see Valeska's pain but do not hear her anguished sobbing.

For much of the rest of This House, we are shown moments of the past, as well as possible futures, from Tessa's point of view. She is not a ghost, but Charles suggests that her consciousness continues to exist in some form, even if only in the memory of the living. Tessa returns to her mother in private moments, referring to herself as a "mass of particles" but seemingly quite flesh and blood. As Tessa's voiceover reminds us, she anticipated a future for herself, and This House tries to create that future life, for the benefit of the girl herself and for her mother, who was forced to let go far sooner than she should have.

Charles also shows us the family's various interfaces with official institutions and political realities, systems that are in place to manage death but must always do some from an emotional remove. From the officious white coroner who tells Tessa's family that "she suffered a lot," to the welfare worker who is charged with making sure Valeska is capable of taking care of herself, these people exist outside the orbit of the mother's pain, and so Charles presents them as figures of relative realism who are intruding on a trauma that they can never understand.

This House uses the power of cinema to generate an experiential bubble for Tessa and Valeska, where their relationship may continue to exist. It is a space apart, abstracted from what we think of as the real world. But Charles gives it solidity, composing a space in time where mother and daughter can continue the life they were supposed to have. I thought about Mohsen Malkmalbaf's A Moment of Innocence while watching This House, because like Makhmalbaf's film, this is a work that alters "the facts" to create a higher form of realism, one that is adequate to the psychic needs of its subjects. In dreams, it is said, begin responsibilities, and Miryam Charles has created a work of cinema that is responsible to the lives of loved ones, lives that should have existed along a trajectory of peace and safety.