29 July 2017

I know nothing stays the same

but if you’re willing to play the game

it will be coming around again

Carly Simon - ‘Coming Around Again’

          Something is rotten in the bin in the kitchen. I smelt it yesterday, when I pressed my slipper down onto the pedal too hard and the lid swung back further than I used to let it. I can smell it now, even though I’m in my bedroom, on the other side of the flat, and all the doors are closed. I press my nose into my pillow. The sweet, putrid odour mingles with another; one I have, until now, been only half conscious of in the gathering weeks. It is intimate and bodily. It has been lurking in my bedclothes, subtle yet malevolent, since R’s departure.

I know exactly what it is. The thing that’s rotting in the bin, I mean. It’s the tuna tin that I cut my finger on last week. I’d dared myself to do the dishes, just to see what would happen. When I did the dishes with R, we always put the radio on. He was baffled when I knew all the words to the old songs.

‘You know all the songs. How do you know all the songs?’

 He said it every week, the same words, in exactly the same way. It always made me laugh, how impressed he was. I felt proud, as though I’d written the songs myself. Without R, without the radio, the tuna lid sliced right through the skin, and into my nail, too. I looked down in surprise. It seemed strange that pain could be so physical; so sudden and sharp. I was surprised, too, at the brightness of my blood. I watched as it swilled in with the remains of the tuna. I watched for five minutes, maybe twenty. Maybe forty! Until a noise like a gunshot made me jump in the air. A forgotten carton of orange juice, swollen with gas, fizzed quietly at the end of the kitchen table. It smelt like Bucks Fizz. I dropped the bloody tin into the bin, without pressing the lid down, like you’re supposed to. It was still full of tuna, and me.

       Project for today: take the rubbish out. Not because of the smell. Just as an experiment. Do things as I might have once done them, even though it’s all absurd now, living properly. I smile to myself, nursing the thought of my little excursion, and only admitting defeat when it crosses my mind that if my tears become any thicker, I could choke to death.

* * * * *

             ‘Ow, you fohcking COHNT!’

R and I used to laugh a lot when the men came to collect the bins. We both had Thursdays off. One of the men is Geordie, and always swore because Mrs. Munro fills her bags too full, and they would always split. Mrs. Munro is in her seventies, and unwell. Nothing about the situation was very funny, but R did a good Geordie, and we were smug about being able to sleep in. Sleep together. ‘Nice cohnt,’ said R afterwards.

            One week, R got up early, went down into the garden with a binbag, and divided up Mrs. Munro’s rubbish for the bin-men. It was discovered that the Geordie’s name was Mark. He was from Gateshead. His twin brother had been a mountaineer. When Mrs. Munro got wind of the bin-bag conspiracy, she came down to our door, prodded R with a bony finger and told him not to be such a ‘fucking sap.’

It must be Thursday today. It is ridiculous to me that Mark is down there now, doing his swearing. I think of John Hannah in ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. ee cummings. Or was it Auden? Stop the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the Geordie bin-man from swearing when I’m here on my own. He was my North, my South, my East, my West. He was the only one who could make me come with his tongue. He was twenty-nine. I’m only twenty-two. He was going to show me how to be an adult. I’m not old enough to be in so much pain.

Outside in the garden, Mark’s cries of anguish have not dissipated into the morning air, as they usually do. They are growing louder, and more urgent.

‘JESUS FOCHKING COHNT. SHE’S SLICED ME FOHCKING HAND OFF.’

My heart gives a strange little flutter as I remember. Yesterday, maybe the day before, Mrs. Munro knocked on my door. She didn’t say a word when I finally let her in, just waddled into the kitchen and began to wrestle with the rotting rubbish. I hunched against the wall and watched as the potion of tuna, fermented orange juice and blood dribbled onto her dress. The smell, now that the bag was released from its metal container, was truly horrendous. I felt no embarrassment; I didn’t apologise, or move forwards to help her, or take the burden off her frail hands. Eventually, she was forced to wrap both of her arms around the heavy plastic sack. When she got to the door, she looked back at me.

‘Get the radio on again,’ she said.

‘THAT FOHCKING SILLY OLD BINT’S NOT DONE HER TIN UP; IT’S SEVERED MY FOHCKING HAND,’ bellows Mark presently.

I creep to the bedroom window and fix my eye to the crack in my shutters. Mark’s hand shines with bold, bright blood.  

 ‘Fuck mate. That is vivid,’ says the other bin-man.

Mark looks up at him, clearly furious at the lack of gravity his colleague has attributed to his condition. Then, his face splits open into a grin; he throws his head back and laughs. It’s the loudest laugh I’ve ever heard.

‘Vivid! Yeah, it is that, mate! Vivid! It is that, mate, aye.’

* * * * *

The air in the garden is heavy with July. Vegetation and rain. It thunders down and soaks me.  My bare feet slither over my flip-flops and touch the gravel on the path up to the dustbins. When I left the flat, the easy-listening DJ with her smooth Galaxy chocolate voice had just put on an old Carly Simon song. I set myself a challenge: sing the song under your breath while you take the bin bags out, and if you’re in sync with Carly when you get back into the flat, tomorrow will be a good day. I hurl the bag into the bin, and run back onto the grass to avoid the putrid puff of air when the lid falls. I don’t want to go back into the flat yet, so I lie down on the soaked grass and close my eyes. There are sounds on the air. They float to me from my open kitchen window, two floors up. It’s Carly, and she’s singing along in time with me.

Review: Baker and Bergoch's 'Tangerine'

☾⋆

Shot entirely on iPhone 5s devices, Sean S. Baker and Chris Bergoch’s Tangerine (2015) presents a Los Angeles that pops and shimmers on the screen, all sprinkled donuts and neon retail signs. It’s present-day Christmas Eve, yet the backdrop feels humid and close; there’s a sense that if you stepped through the screen and pressed a piece of bubblegum to the concrete pavement, you’d hear its sticky sizzle. The opening sequence introduces Sin-Dee-Rella (Kitana Rodriguez) and her friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor): two transgender sex-workers with conflicting opinions on best to spend their day. Sin-Dee is ‘back on the block’ after a month-long jail stint, and in hot pursuit of the cisgender woman her pimp/boyfriend has been sleeping with in her absence. Alexandra attempts to reconcile two disparate efforts: quelling her friend’s violent resolve, and flyering for her own singing performance at a club later on.

Rodriguez and Taylor take their lead roles with a raciness entirely befitting the clammy vibrancy of their terrain. The opening sequence is a tour-de-force of quick-fire oaths and increasingly inventive insults (‘his breath always smells like he been eating ass for days’), woven with glimpses of the exquisite fragility which so haunts their respective characters. At some point, Sin-Dee’s mission finds her strutting precariously down Hollywood Boulevard: cue flashbacks to the girls of Pretty Woman jostling amiably for their space on the block, while a smooth synthy score worked tirelessly to ensure that 80s audiences of a more delicate persuasion would leave theatres with all their sensibilities firmly intact. Tangerine has no such cotton wool padding (though I can't vouch for a complete absence of synths. Nor would I ever wish to).
 In one scene, a cisgender woman attempts to turn tricks on streets that are traditionally populated by transgender workers, only to be shoved and reprimanded by a shaken customer (‘What the fuck is that? That corner’s not for pussies’). In another, Alexandra’s client fails to become erect during a transaction, and withholds payment in a chilling display of careless misogyny. Alexandra’s indignation is fierce, yet there is a childlike triviality to her objections which doesn’t marry with the brutality of the episode. Her defensive mask is hardy, and many years in the making. It appears to radiate inwards, too; preventing her own mind from fully digesting the true damage and sorrow of repeated abuse. And yet, despite the heady pace, the film knows when to slow down, and never to greater effect than during Alexandra’s singing performance, through which her alienation is laid beautifully bare.

The denouement will remind everyone of something. As Tangerine’s various faces and voices are brought together under one roof (Donut Land, Santa Monica blvd) we’re offered an almost Shakespearean blend of tragedy, farce and chaos: Much Ado About Nothing, perhaps, though the film offers none of the cohesive resolutions of Shakespeare’s play. In Tangerine, nobody is innocent, yet as the characters go their separate ways, the audience are left to ponder who might shine on, and who will fade into the night, like the various fates of the Christmas Eve stars above the City of Angels, where Baker and Bergoch laid their scene.

                                                                                                by Rosa Barbour

Scent story draft

When Paul’s face appeared, hovering anxiously at her hospital window, Jessica was very annoyed with her mother.

            ‘That poor boy. Look at him. He loves you.’

            ‘Send him away, mum.’

            ‘I can’t understand it,’ said Susan.

            There was no easy way to explain her rejection of Paul, the father of her unborn child - who loved her - to her mother. It was all tied up in orgasms.

Whenever Jessica visualised her orgasms (as she often did, subconsciously, and usually at the moment of their occurrence), she thought in colour. Each one was a mass of pink and red, like the glow in front of your eyes when you close them and turn your face up to the sun. As she drew close to the edge, a tiny white circle of light would appear in the blush. In order to achieve the fleeting stabs of pleasure that were the top prize of each frantic endeavour, it was necessary to touch the light at exactly the right moment, with the correct amount of pressure; in doing so, the spot would grow brighter, more focussed, and eventually split the rosy haze.

When she met Paul, Jessica had made the unpleasant discovery that it was possible to have an orgasm that was devoid of any pleasurable sensation whatsoever. Paul never touched the white light – never came close - but sometimes, when he was especially diligent in his efforts to stimulate her, Jessica would go suddenly numb; the orgasm had come and gone without announcing itself, and the little white spot would pale and fade as soon as it had appeared. No screams. No light. No relief.

There wasn’t much worse. 

The unbearable frustration of it all aside, Jessica was squeamish, and the thought of these phantom climaxes made her uneasy. When she slipped on her underwear soon afterwards - as she always did with Paul - she could not bear the feeling of the thin net material against her. The skin that covered her engorged clitoris felt thin, stretched to the point of translucency. She would be spent for at least three hours, and yet had been robbed of the heady dose of dopamine and the pleasant smarting sensation that accompanied her real, blinding orgasms, which had only ever been achieved when she was alone. When she went for a pee after sex with Paul, there was always a twinge, at exactly the spot he should have hit. By pushing harder, she somehow hoped to trigger the lost throes. Eventually, she’d give up, pissing out yet another near miss.

At length, after Paul had been dispatched, Jessica’s baby fell out of her. He was vividly coloured: red and yellow and blue, but quiet. Jessica, delirious and exhausted, giggled up at her mother as a doctor whisked him away.

            ‘Start as you mean to go on.’

            Susan stared down at her daughter tremulously.

            ‘What do you mean?’

            ‘Another night owl. Sorry mum.’

Jessica slipped out of consciousness for a moment. When she woke, she cat-called the midwife in her lairy Friday night voice.

            ‘Let me have him! I don’t care about the slime.’

            Looks were exchanged. Pros and cons weighed up in seconds. This happened sometimes. They were used to it.

Eventually, the tiny purple body was placed gravely into Jessica’s arms. She held him happily for a moment, before her head rolled back, and she fell into a deep sleep. Susan caught the baby just in time. She threw up bile into the bedside sink as she imagined his head bruising, or not bruising. She wasn’t sure if you could still bruise when your heart had stopped.

In her dream, Jessica is about twelve, on holiday with her mother and sister. She lolls around on a jetty, jutting out from the sand to kiss a glittering pink sea. She is bored and too hot, in her mother’s huge white pants. She jumps into the water, and cuts her foot on a stone. It's sore, but there is something pleasant about the way the blood feels, flowing freely from the puncture in her heel. Lots of it. Enough that the water around her foot feels warm. Her head feels warm, too. She has never fainted before. She wonders if you can faint in water. Her mother and sister’s voices bleat down at her. She leans her head back, and lets her hair billow around, like the blood. As consciousness drains from her, she pictures herself in a film, camera below her, picking up the beautiful colours of her mermaid body.

            When she wakes up, she is being held aloft by strong arms. They lay her down onto a terracotta floor. It is porous and warm, as though it’s been sucking in the sun all day. When she opens her eyes, they are met with the steady, calm stare of a man. Above his head, the sun splits a rosy cloud. She smiles, and stretches her arms up to him. She feels that if she is taken away from him, away from the terracotta, she will be cold, and unable to warm up again. She feels a woman’s hand on her face; it is too thin and feminine for this moment. She brushes it away. The man reaches down, and places his own hands on her temples, and holds them there. No one, not her mother, could ever protect her like this man.

She gurgles happily, and rolls over on the terracotta, so that her cheek can rest against it. The tiles become spherical; she wraps her arms and legs around them. The dream landscape shifts; she is older, back in her hospital bed. She clutches the terracotta sphere to her stomach. It changes; becomes skin. Her skin. Her bump. The man who pulled her from the Spanish water stands over her.

‘I’m all sweaty,’ she says, holding her arms up to him. She likes the way she sounds when she says it. He puts his hands on either side of her head, at her temples, and holds them there.

'The Whole of the Moon'

There were no pictures on Google featuring these particular words, so I made one myself (click to see the whole thing!) From one of the best songs ever made: lyrics that have comforted me since I was a kid. There are many theories as to who or what this song is about, and it means different things to everyone who loves it. I first heard it when I was about 13, and spending lots of time on my own (sometimes content in solitude, sometimes not). Occasionally, I felt ashamed that I did not spend as much time in the company of my peers as others of my age seemed to.

This song helped me see that it's great to be active, and surround yourself with people (if those actions are meaningful, and the people are kind and good, and healthy for you), but that it is also okay to spend time alone, and to be introspective and reflective. Introspection is often associated with loneliness, and it's true that too much of it can take you to a lonely place. But you can also learn many things this way, not just about yourself, but about the whole world and everything in it! ('every precious dream and vision underneath the stars!') Self-awareness, empathy and insight are rare gems. They make for the best art; they create CONNECTIONS; they make the world a less alienating place. Let them glitter and flourish.

I'll sign off with what just might be the most magical video on YouTube: Mike Scott and Vinnie Kilduff playing 'The Whole of the Moon' for an audience of schoolchildren in Connemara, Ireland, 1987.

'Dulce Ahumado Vaina'

‘‘Dulce… Dulce Ahumado Vaina,’ this one’s called,’ says Matthew. ‘You know, for simplicity's sake.’

            The label, etched in monochrome by a local artist, bears a sturdy vanilla pod, held like a cigarette between painted lips. Jessica unscrews the lid. A sweet, humid smell pools into the air around her. It is the smell of her mother, before Jo. It is the smell of Matthew’s fingers on the beach, when he leant over and painted a neat strip of tanning oil on her nose. And something else, much further back. A sicklier odour, with the same mingling top-notes:

Corinne, four months pregnant and still nubile on the floor of the girls’ changing rooms at secondary school. ‘Impulse’ body spray – the yellow one - cloys with the smoke hanging limply under the skylight. Corinne cackles as she takes her cigarette between her toes; angles her leg high to take a drag. Jessica stares in muted fascination as a tiny yellow thong disappears between stubbly, razor-burnt labia.

‘You looking at my cunt, cunt?’

She wasn’t. Well, not really. She was looking at the thong; imagining the thin material snaking its way up into Corinne’s stomach, and winding around her baby’s tiny, frog-spawn throat. Billie, it was to be called. After Billie Piper. Didn’t matter if it was a boy or a girl: Billie either way. If Billie died early on, thought Jessica, maybe Corinne wouldn’t bleed as much as her mother had.

‘It’s tobacco. And vanilla. Like the Tom Ford,’ says Jessica presently, turning the bottle over in her hands.

‘There’s nothing on the back. No list, or… ingredients.’

Matthew saunters. Hands on her waist.

‘Ingredients? Well, no, my pleb. You’re in darkest Bohemia.’

Jessica lolls against him: indignant, delighted. Matthew, with all the confidence and radiance of immense privilege. He smirks lots. Too much. He is downright filthy. But his eyes are clever and warm. It is love.
He consults his phone drunkenly, chin on her shoulder: Pedro Ximénez. Fortuna.

‘Here we are. Dulce Ahumado Vaina. Translation: sweet... well, I knew that. Sweet, smoky little pod.’

He looks at her. ‘Little pod. Just like you. Pea-pod. Cardamom. Vanilla.’

‘I’m not a pod,’ says Jessica. 
Jo and Billie. They had been peas. Seeds.

‘Well, anyway,' says Matthew. ‘I’m buying it. Te amo, etcetera.’

For a week, the scent takes on new shape and depth. It changes. It mingles with their skin, with carotene and sea salt. With week two comes the morning sickness. Vomit, bile, ‘Dulce Ahumado Vaina,’glass, Matthew’s cigarettes - all but one – straight down the sink.

'Once More, With Feeling' extract

Back in her room, Katie tries to cheer me up with Dawsons Creek re-runs and a warm bottle of rosé, but I am monosyllabic, and after a while she leaves me to it. I gaze at the ceiling, letting the muted sounds of the telly wash over me until I fall asleep. Sometime in the wee small hours, I awake to an inky dark room. The faint rumble of traffic is punctuated by the whoosh of Katie’s soft snoring, in and out, like a gentle tide. Thirsty and disorientated, I slip out of bed.

The hallway is deep blue with shadow, lit only by a shaft of moonlight leaking in through a small, circular skylight above my head. When I was young, I was fascinated by this peephole to the trees and purple stars. I gaze up at it for a moment, before a noise behind me makes me jump.

Robbie stands at the top of the stairs, his shiny hair messier than usual, sticking up dramatically at the back.

‘Hello,’ I whisper. ‘Did you just get home?’

‘Nah, been home for ages. Mum and Suzy stayed… They were on a roll with Dolly Parton. Thought I’d leave them to it.’

‘Ah. Sorry, I just needed to get some water. Did I wake you up?’

‘No, I was up. Jerry.’ He gestures to the little grey dog with his foot.

'Why's he called Jerry?'

‘He's a Springer spaniel.'

‘Oh right… Should have got a Cocker. Then you could have called it Jarvis.'

‘Yeah. That would have been better.'

‘Yeah.’

A branch scratches against the oval window above his head, the moon flitting in and out of view behind it. 

Maybe it’s the silence of the house, or something to do with the way the light falls over Robbie’s face, but suddenly I feel relaxed and calm in his company; the gaucheness of this morning’s exchange in the kitchen mercifully evaporated.

'I used to love that window,’ I tell him. ‘Looking out of it, I mean. At night'

Robbie turns round to look properly, rubbing the back of his neck.

'Yeah, I remember that. You'd sit in the middle of the hall and everyone would trip over you.'

‘It was only you that tripped over me because you were galumphing about like a bloody boy and not looking where you were going. You were like something out of a Robinsons barley water advert,' I tell him indignantly.

‘That's normal boy stuff, though. You were—’

‘What? Abnormal?’

‘It was sort of normal until you started serenading the moon.’

‘Get lost—’

‘You did. In a strange, high-pitched squeal. Sitting there in the middle of the hall staring up at a window singing about the moon. Nutcase.’

He looks at me like I’m an alien. But his eyes are crinkled, and I feel like a nice alien. An alien that he’s actually quite fond of.

I wonder how Suzy feels when he looks at her. I doubt aliens are involved at all.

‘Come in here a minute,’ says Robbie after a pause, motioning to his bedroom door.

I pull my cardigan around myself like a fluffy shield, and watch him as he opens the door wider to let me into his bedroom. Robbie reads the look on my face and rubs his hair again.

            ‘Just for a sec. So I can talk to you.’

I do as I’m told. He closes the door gently behind me and I hesitate, unsure where to put myself. He begins to clear large piles of books and clothes from his bed while I gaze around. Rita has kept his room the way it was when he lived here; the same glow-in-the-dark plastic stars and moons on the slanted ceiling, globules of violet Blu-Tack showing through their centres. Faded grey T-shirts puddle the floorboards, his jeans on the heated radiator, so the air smells of washing powder and something else familiar and Robbie-ish. Only Suzy’s sequinned dress on the hanger indicates that things have moved on.

Robbie allows a final book to slide from his duvet to the floor with a loud clunk, and gestures to the uncluttered space on his bed. I perch on the corner, watching him sink into a frayed chair. A beat before he looks at me. I’m suddenly very aware that I’m not wearing much, and that my eyes are carrying the smudged remains of Rimmel's Granite and Fog.

‘Are you alright?’

            I know what he’s getting at. I look at him questioningly all the same.

            ‘Just… the karaoke thing with your dad. I wondered if you were alright with it.’

            ‘Alright with it?’

            ‘…Yeah,’ he says, embarrassed.

            ‘Would you be alright with it, Robbie?’

            ‘Probably not, no.’

He bites his thumbnail briefly, then rubs his chin with the palm of his hand. I wonder why I sound so angry when I suddenly feel safe and warm. He tries again.

‘He was pissed.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Not that that helps.’

‘No.’

‘I did Sweet Caroline once, when I was pissed. That’s my point.’

‘Sweet Caroline wasn’t the bittersweet soundtrack of your recently-failed marriage though. Was it?’

He sighs, leans back against the desk, and searches the ceiling for inspiration. He hasn’t noticed that I’m smiling.

‘Look, I’m just… He’s having a sort of… Martin-Clunes-does-divorced-dad-for-BBC-2 moment. Going through the motions to see if anything helps. Tonight was just the whisky and singing stage. It won’t last.’

            ‘It’s alright, Robbie. You’re off the hook.’

He looks at me properly, and is relieved enough to show his teeth when he smiles, taking himself by surprise.

            ‘Sorry, that was shit. I’m not really—’

            ‘No. Was good. Thanks... I’m alright.’

Seconds pass, silent. I feel buoyed up by his care for me, as though a fragile, transparent film surrounds us and his bedroom, floating away from the other rooms of the house, the street beyond, the fears of tomorrow. Robbie’s bedroom is a tiny planet, drifting in the gentle night time, with new and delicate rules of gravity. I want to stay here, to hold on tight to the yellow warmth.

Robbie stretches back against his chair. His thin black jumper rises for a second to reveal a sliver of navel. As I watch him, my thoughts are stolen by another memory.

I’m sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor in our old living room, covering my school jotters with wrapping paper. I can just hear the puffs and sighs of Mum’s iron over the radio. The song changes: Natural Woman, by Carole King.

 ‘Listen to this one,’ says Mum.

I pause in my jotter-wrapping, intrigued by the rapt, dreamy look in her eyes as she sings along quietly, fluently.

‘Looking out on the pouring rain, I used to feel uninspired…’

 I listen for a while, before going back to my jotters.

‘Yes, well,’ says Mum. ‘Give it about ten years. You’ll know what she’s on about.’

Presently, Robbie opens his eyes, gazing at the ceiling. I know how I want to thank him. Test these new rules of gravity. Cross the room, settle my body around his on the chair, draw his face to my neck, let my hair fall around him. Let him make me feel graceful. For a second, it feels almost possible. Natural.

He looks at me, worried about my silence. I smile.

‘It’s alright, Robbie. Really. Whatever it is I’m feeling, I’m going to channel it. I’m going to make it into something good.’

He frowns, puzzled.

I close the door softly as I leave.

☾⋆

'Day of the Flowers' film review

‘Day of the Flowers’ review – 03.9.16

          

Respecting Cuba on the big screen demands that the country’s contrasts are addressed without glorification, and Eirene Houston’s screenplay provides the necessary balance of locational beauty and unpatronising social commentary in her 2012 film ‘Day of the Flowers.’ When their father dies suddenly, contrasting sisters Rosa and Ailie fly to Cuba – a place close to the heart of the family – to scatter his ashes. On their first night in the country, they are taken to a popular dancing club: a money-making outlet dealing in crude approximations of Cuban authenticity. Ailie loves the spectacle; Rosa is uneasy. ‘They have to give tourists what think they’ll like,’ she is solemnly informed by a fellow traveller. 

       Some may argue that in turn, giving cinema-goers ‘what they like’ would involve a multiplication of sassy, humid dance scenes on one hand, and less focus on Rosa’s unpleasant experience with a poverty-stricken Cuban family on the other. However, the sequence depicting Rosa’s trauma is powerful and valid: not only does it frankly acknowledge conditions which for many are a reality; in addition, the results on Rosa’s character are complex and pivotal. For the first time, the viewer is shown the value she holds for her own life: a value previously eclipsed by her admirable (yet occasionally misguided) compassion for others. As she is gently reminded later in the film, one cannot ‘fight for the revolution every day.’ Before her ordeal, she had begun to lose vital strands of her own self in the attempt.

This a film with a deep reverence for Cuba; its vitality, strength and contradictions… yet with a simultaneous commitment to the parallel nuances of its human characters. Carlos Acosta’s Tomas is serene yet deeply powerful, and one cannot miss the luxurious twinkle during his first meeting with Rosa. He understands that she must make peace with herself before she can achieve her goal of facilitating peace for others, and as such, there is a complexity to their rapport which elevates it beyond that of a generic, plot-driven romance. An unfaltering understanding of the blossom and thorns of another’s character is an essential ingredient of love as it should be. The film understands this, and watching the pair bristle towards their combined fate is genuinely cathartic; a dynamic that is mirrored and complimented by the presentation of the sisters’ own relationship.

Eva Birthistle’s Rosa is sincere and relatable in her humanity, while Manuel de Blas and Charity Wakefield provide what is – for me – the most moving moment of the piece, in a single exchange of glance. This is a thoughtful, sumptuous piece of cinema which should not be allowed to fall off the map through lack of deserved exposure. 

By Rosa Barbour

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