"Ghosts challenge our calendars.” — Bliss Cua Lim
I have been watching Miryam Charles’ feature-length film Cette Maison for three weeks.
Every once in a while I stumble across a film that unravels me on a spiritual and emotional level yet completely reinvigorates my love for film. Cette Maison, more of a portal than a film, required so much presence from me.
Synopsis: Shot on dreamy 16mm, the stunning debut feature from Haitian-Canadian filmmaker Miryam Charles resurrects a tragedy that occurred within her own family–the unresolved death of her cousin–to weave a ghostly and gorgeous reflection on memory, grief, and what could have been. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, a teenage girl is found hanged in her room. While everything points to suicide, the autopsy report reveals something else. Ten years later, the director examines the causes and consequences of this unsolved crime. Like an imagined biography, Cette Maison explores the relationship between the security of home and the violence that can jeopardize it. – Criterion
The spirit of Charles’ cousin Terra Alexis Wallace is reanimated as “Tessa” (portrayed by Schelby Jean-Baptiste) in the film. She comes back in “an adult body that never existed” to recount her death, help her mother process grief, and reclaim the future she never lived.
There is an uncanny scene at the beginning of the film where Tessa is sitting in front of a white wall in a shadowy room in the house she died in, struggling to recount her birth and death. She is being “interviewed” by the director, who is off-screen and never seen throughout the film. As she stutters over her words, the director offers her water. She takes a breath before trying again. Behind her is a red beam that separates the softly-lit left side of the wall from the shadowed right. On the left side, there is a painting above a photo of the real Terra as a child. On the right side, there is a clock above a painted replica of Terra’s child portrait.
This scene composition makes me think about the spatial and temporal fluidity that spirits occupy. They are always in the in-between space of space and time. In her book “Translating Time,” film theorist Bliss Cua Lim talks about “spectral time,” explaining that spirits exist out of the sequential and calendrical time of the living. She writes that if we expand our understanding of time and space, “we would find not measurable and divisible intervals of time and space but an ever-moving universe in which everything is bound to everything else, nothing is solid or still, and the past and the present, subject and object, all inter-permeate each other.” In this vein, Charles employs film to bend spaces and manipulate time to serve the perspective of Terra, had she lived.
“Anything is possible here,” Terra states throughout the film.
This film is personal—sacred, even. Because grief is a sacred and personal thing. It is heavy. Grief is as common as hunger but it feels taboo to express it. The social discomfort around grief and the inevitability of death is why I’ve been watching this film for three weeks. I’d get 15 minutes in, and a single line would completely shatter me. At times, I felt intimidated by the layers of meaning interwoven throughout each scene, embedded within the poetic dialogues and monologues, and immersed between the coalescence of sounds/image/emotion. Yet, at other times, I felt transported into this dreamlike space where the heaviness of grief danced with delightful (re)imagination. Charles’ use of 16mm as a medium to explore memory and attempt to make tangible the intangible, cyclical experience of grief is beautiful.
In a recent interview with writer Nataleah Hunter-Young, Charles says, “I was trying to translate how trauma affects memories, how trauma affects time. For me, going back and forth through time was a realistic [representation] of what trauma did to my mind and what it did to my family members.”
While watching Cette Maison, I sensed the director was okay with the audience not knowing how to digest the depth of emotion apparent throughout this film; with it not being legible to everyone. Somehow, that made me love the film even more. I surrendered to being present in witnessing the depth of emotion and evocative storytelling throughout the film.
Her use of sound for this film is absolutely haunting. She mixes and overlays the sounds of owls, birds, insects with the violin. She mutes the rumbling of thunder, wind interference with mic, the sounds of waves crashing to explore the emotional weight of grief on the characters. I have never heard more artful sound design in a film.
“Sound allows us more freedom in telling stories. In images, we automatically look for sense or purpose. We try to make connections with Images. With sound, there’s a little bit of room. It’s okay [to hear it] not knowing exactly where you are or what’s happening. Your brain is more open that way.” — Miryam Charles, in conversation with Nataleah Hunter-Young
Although Tessa takes center stage, so much about this film is about a mother and daughter moving through time and space to come to terms with loss, death, and violence that exists within families. Tessa’s mother, Valeska, is also central to this story. We see her dealing with the weight of death. Her visitations with Tessa are bittersweet vignettes.
In one scene, Valeska brings Tessa, who is tucked in bed, a cake. As Tessa eats, she looks longingly at her dead daughter and says, “I can take your place.” Meaning, I can die for you to live. Tessa, seemingly taking on the persona of a parent, chides “It doesn’t work like that. Life is testing you to remind you how precious it is.”
It took me three weeks to watch Cette Maison. It might take me three more to understand the layers of meaning present. However, what feels clear is the care and intention in how Charles handled the exploration of a family tragedy.