Joy (Max Eigenmann) is an overseas worker in the UK. She's a trained healthcare worker, but she has difficulty getting jobs and might not be able to stay in the country for long. Joining her is Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla), her daughter. Grace longs for a proper bed and some time to play, but their current living situation makes that difficult. Joy then comes across an opportunity to work as a housekeeper for a barrister (Leanne Best) and her comatose uncle (David Hayman). She takes the job, but surreptitiously smuggles Grace into the house as well.
Raging Grace is structured like a Hitchcockian thriller, with tension creeping along every corner of the film. I'd say it's best to see the film without reading anything about it, so I will refrain from detailing anything major. Instead, I will focus on something that was said during the Q and A portion that I kept coming back to during the writing process of this review.
Max Eigenmann mentioned something about Grace's character; in many parts of the film, the child sometimes appears out of nowhere. Director Paris Zarcilla and cinematographer Joel Honeywell lean into this, treating her appearances as jump scares or sudden camera movements, as if she were a ghost. And Eigenmann notes that that's Grace's talent: she learned how to become a ghost because she needed to be - it's part of her experience as an illegal immigrant. There's a little of that nature in Joy as well - she didn't announce Grace's existence to her employer out of fear.
And that leads me to how workers abroad and immigrants in general are often 'made' to be invisible - in one sense, via assimilation, seen in the many small things Joy's employers impose on her, such as cooking something more to their tastes. A certain character in the film starts to forget their own language after living so long in another country. The other sense is invisibility via the suppression of personhood and autonomy, as Joy is treated as a servant more than a person, who only exists to follow orders and nothing more. 'Masters' do not need to know the opinion of their 'pets,' and there's a whole history behind that sentiment (considering this does take place in the UK, it's quite appropriate.) While Joy is a trained healthcare professional, her knowledge and expertise is suppressed at first, but when she manages to use her talents (combined with knowledge that is distinctly of her homeland), the results are quite astonishing.
The most harrowing aspect of immigrant life is isolation, and while finding a place to belong may lead us to dark paths, there's a scene in the film that shows the warmth of community and how it gives life to us in equal measure.
Dodin (Benoit Magimel) is a talented restaurant owner and gourmet, lauded by his peers as the Napoleon of cuisine or some such title. In his 20 years in the business, he has worked closely with Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), an accomplished and equally talented cook. Together they're a force to be reckoned with in the French culinary world, though they've never stopped to think about what they mean to each other.
Tran Anh Hung's The Taste of Things is 70% scenes of preparing and eating food: I personally wouldn't be surprised if these scenes outnumbered scenes where people talked. In one early scene one of Dodin's friends notes that as men established civilization, there was a shift from merely eating food for the sake of survival to eating food purely for pleasure. And with that paradigm shift, our relationship with food changed, evolving into social activity. There's something profoundly intimate in actions around food: in eating it (together), in preparing it (for someone), in teaching a particular taste to someone else. People whose love language is acts of service will have a field day watching.
Cooking in this film is a sort of language as well: merely observing the various dishes prepared gives context to what's going on. A light soup or a rich melding of flavors communicates an identity, care (or carelessness), concern for a loved one, or even the fond memory of someone whose time has long passed.
No comments:
Post a Comment