Laura Ferrés, an award-winning filmmaker for her short film The Disinherited, makes her feature debut with The Permanent Image which speaks of the human connection through images.
The film opens with a mother and a daughter getting their photo taken. But it’s not just any photo. It’s a photo exposed with another photo, one of the mother’s husband/the daughter’s father, a man who is gone now. It is a picture with a ghost. Only there was an expectation of the way the photo was supposed to be taken, and the daughter Antonia smiled, breaking that expectation. It is quickly revealed that the daughter breaks a lot of expectations, as she is heavily pregnant despite just being on the cusp of her teens.
She sasses back about the commercialism of their faith when they bring them an ad for Beyer Advil with a prayer for Saint Carmen on it. Her attitude eventually leads them to cut off her hair to punish her. After she gives birth, she wanders off. And the film moves forward 50 years and changes style dramatically.
The film goes from a very rural setting (Andalusia) to a city (Catalonia), even if we spend most of our time in interior spaces, it just feels like a city. We are now in the world of casting with Carmen, the name of Antonia’s baby, so we are to presume it’s her adult daughter, who works casting people. While the first project Carmen casts is clear, a “smoking kills” warning, her main casting project is less clear. It involves her seeking people who have arrived in Catalonia and asking them their stories, but it’s used in the film as a tool for her to come across a now-grown Antoni. Who punches her for taking her picture without permission and then whips her up a bottle of perfume. The banana on the table gives away Antonia’s identity long before she says her name, because her younger self spoke often about bananas, only ever able to indulge in imaginary ones.
The film uses non-professional actors and that gives pretty much every scene, once the characters arrive in Catalonia, a sense of rawness. While the film is infused with a wry humour there is also a melancholy to it. Antonia goes through life with a laugh and a joke, but there is a sadness to her. Is it the ghost of the father she carries with her? Is it the story behind how she got pregnant with Carmen? Because her statement sounds consensual, but we never see the guy, and she was also 12. Did she even know what she was consenting to? She was still a child herself when she had a child. The only person young Antonia expresses interest in is her friend, who rebuffs her believing it to be sinful because they are both girls. The film doesn’t answer. But it does allow her image to be captured and for it to take time for her to have a moment. And in that moment, for her to experience her emotions and find some of that joy she lost along the way in adulthood. And perhaps that is what The Permeant Image is. Our core self. The one we carry with us from our youth into our old age.
The use of music, particularly during the scenes in Andalusia when the girls sang in chorus, really added to a sense of place in the film. I was actually jarred when the time jump happened because of how richly set up the initial time period was. But then I settled in and watched the characters come back together at a later stage in life, strangers but not strange to each other.
The Permanent Image had its World Premiere at Locarno 76 in their Concorso internazionale section.
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