Memories of a Burning Body, the second feature film from Costa Rican director Antonella Sudassani Furniss, takes a rare close look at sexuality through the lens of women in later life. Describing the film as the conversation she never had with her grandmothers, Sudassani distils the reflections of three women on the feminine experience of living in a highly patriarchal and conservative culture. Personified by a singular unnamed actress, we hear these women’s stories in their own voices. They speak in turn, unseen, the audience never quite sure which one is speaking. Each voice flows into the other, emphasizing the universal quality of their experiences.
The film immediately confronts the audience with its innovative style, opening on the busy film crew’s preparations to shoot the first frame. Toying with our conceptions of memory and perception in a fashion reminiscent of Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage, Sudassani makes good use of this conceit – the artifice made visible – to root us in the fundamental truth of these stories. The accuracy of the details is not the important part here, she seems to be telling us. The deeper truths at hand are what really matter. Making clever use of lighting, production design, and intricate choreography, the film seamlessly transitions from one time period and place to another, all the while bound by the same set of walls.
Further playing with fixed notions of time and space, the film embodies a physical manifestation of the ways memories exist in both the past and the present all at once. The stories of the past creep into the present, quite literally, as the characters from her stories begin to wander through the scene as our protagonist recollects them. We know we’re in for an intriguing journey when a group of sprightly chickens appear next to her as she tidies up around the house. As our narrators remind us, “time is like a bubble,” and our memories allow us to move around inside that bubble as we like. There is truth to be found in our memories, but that truth can be malleable as well.
One of those central truths is the inherent vulnerability the female experience. The stories of these three women hit upon so many familiar milestones: the thrill of young love, the confusions wrought by puberty and burgeoning sexualities, and the hopeless darkness of abuse and assault that follows so many throughout their lives. When the story turns to an exploration of domestic violence, this universality is made explicit: “You think it’s just your story… but no… it’s the same story for many.” We feel the weight and weaponization of guilt levied against these women as they struggle, and observe how their behaviour can be policed not just by men, but by other women as well. Making powerful use of its unconventional theatrical structure, our central actress at one point breaks the fourth wall and confronts the audience directly, throwing that guilt back onto us, daring us to look away, or to recognize ourselves in the deeper truths of the stories these women have to tell.
More happily, Sudassani’s film goes a long way to correcting the erasure of older women as sexual beings. One of the most enjoyable sequences in the film follows our protagonist getting ready for a date with all the girlish anticipation of her youth. No longer weighed down by the shame and the guilt imposed upon her throughout her life, she is free to pursue what she likes. Obviously enjoying herself and the confidence that all her years and experiences have brought her, we relish in her liberation and her pleasure. After so many trials, she has earned that joy, and we celebrate it.
Our narrators finally appear to us at the end of the film, but still, we never see their faces. Sudassani is telling the story not just of these women, but of all women. At one point our protagonist is told by her father to “bear it… it is your cross.” He could very well be speaking to all women, bearing the heavy cross of feminine vulnerability.
Memories of a Burning Body premieres in the Panorama programme at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival.
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