The Viewfinder is a fortnightly column by writer and critic Rahul Desai, that looks at films through a personal lens.
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The Amazon anthology Solos opens with Leah, a short film starring Anne Hathaway as a physicist who has spent five years holed up in a mad-scientist basement. It’s 2024, and Leah is obsessed with cracking the time-travel code. She wants to teleport herself into the future. Leah soon touches base with her sassy 2029 version and her greenhorn 2019 version. At first, we assume that Leah wants to enter the future to find a cure for her dying mother. But while three Anne Hathaways argue with one another, it’s revealed that her reason isn’t as heroic: Leah wants to actually escape the present. She can’t bear the trauma of seeing a parent waste away. She plans to leave her mother behind in the beige hospital room and leap forward. But Leah 2029, a wealthy Nobel Laureate, begs her to stay back: the guilt is crippling, and she never does find a cure. She admits to Leah — an anagram for “heal” — that there isn’t an hour she doesn’t regret abandoning her mother.
The 30-minute film is distinctly profound in how it uses mandatory science fiction tropes to explore the meaning — the cost, conflict, joy, despair — of being human and, by extension, flawed. The three Leahs evoke the animated Pixar masterpiece Inside Out, for they symbolise the three emotions in the head of a specific and special kind of human: the caregiver. Leah 2019 is naive and energetic, unaware of the loss that lies ahead. Leah 2029 is the edgy escapist, having leapfrogged a brutal reality to make it go away. And Leah 2024, the protagonist, is somewhere in between — selfless on the verge of being selfish, hopeful on the cusp of hopelessness, love on the brink of grief.
Her predicament brings to mind Olivia Colman’s Anne in The Father, a middle-aged Londoner anguished by the advancing dementia of her old man, Anthony (an Oscar-winning Anthony Hopkins). The film opens with Anne tentatively informing her father that she might be moving to Paris to be with a man. In other words, she is the real-world version of Leah. Despite her kindness, Anne seems to be tired of putting her own life on hold. Anthony’s shift into her flat has taken a toll on her romantic relationship and rhythms. The film ends with Anthony in his own beige hospital room of sorts: a nursing home. A guilt-stricken Anne has moved to Paris, paying him monthly visits.
In a way, the two heartbreaking chamber dramas complete one another. The Father unfurls from the perspective of the disoriented parent, while Leah shows us the conflict of the caregiver. We don’t see Leah’s mother, we only hear her weak voice on the phone, just as Anne is a peripheral shape-shifting presence in Anthony’s life. The visual experience of one side implies the desolation of the other. Time — and its emotional dissonance — is a common narrative language. Anthony’s fractured memory jumps back and forth in time, meshing his today with dotted yesterdays. Leah strives to forget through an actual time-travel portal.
I’ve immersed myself in hundreds of films during this pandemic, feeling them a bit differently than if I were in an ordinary universe. The cackles are throatier. The lump is a permanent tenant in the throat. The heart is jumpier. But Leah and The Father are two of only three movies that have truly broken me. Like quivering-wreck shattered me. The third one is Dick Johnson Is Dead, a personal documentary in which its creator uses her craft to customise her fate as a hapless caregiver. Director Kirsten Johnson moves her dementia-afflicted father Richard ‘Dick’ Johnson into her cramped New York City apartment. She then repeatedly “stages” Dick’s death in gory accidents — her method of perhaps bypassing the indignity of watching his mind fade away. She frames this coping mechanism as the film: at once an act of compassion (the ‘deaths’ renegotiate Dick’s sickness) and self-preservation (they soothe her own ache). In a sense, she is both Leah and Anne, torn between mourning a slow-burning tragedy and escaping it.
I’ll never forget the last year for several reasons. Not least among them is the fact that it has featured my lowest hour as a son. My relationship with both my parents has been severely tested. Last October, I had the worst row of my life with my father. A month ago, I had the ugliest spat of my adulthood with my mother. These were separate but cumulative explosions. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of them. In that week, my father was ill and therefore singularly caustic. On that night, my mother was laid low by the toxic cocktail of cabin fever and alcohol. I got provoked by things they said. By their uncharacteristic egotism. But in hindsight, it was my blinding panic that had molecularly rearranged itself to resemble fury. My rage was not random — it was a desperate consequence of watching them age. Of hearing them lose control and morph into shadows of their previous selves. I couldn’t handle the fragility of their spirit. Most of all, my father’s obstinacy and my mother’s incoherence gave me a sobering glimpse into the future. It’s not the caregiving I’m afraid of. I know it’s coming. Being the only child, it’s inevitable, and I’m prepared to be unprepared. That’s the circle of life.
I realised that my emphatic reaction to these films stems from the shock of seeing myself in the three daughters. Like Leah, I’m afraid of getting consumed by my own inertia. Like Anne, I’ve begun to fear that my reading of responsibility might hijack my sense of individualism. Like Kirsten, I’m worried that there is no ‘I’ in ‘We’. I recall screaming the words “Stop holding me back!” during both fights. And I recollect the hurt in my parents’ eyes, on being reduced from emotional anchors to metallic shackles. These are images I’ll take to my grave. These are moments that make me wish I could reconnect with my 2019 self and beg him to behave, stay patient and not do things I’m bound to regret for eternity.
Over the years, I’ve subscribed to a narrative in which I’m the scrappy survivor of a dysfunctional family. I tend to embrace the notion that I’m moving ahead despite my family, not because of them. I know this isn’t true, and that it’s just my defense mechanism kicking in. But I also know I’m not traditionally selfless, and that when faced with the eventuality of a parent’s failing health, I might yearn for my psychological release over their physical relief. Rather than praying for a swift and merciful demise, my inability to witness their withering might prompt me to be the one who escapes instead. My restlessness to advance might tempt me to evade fate instead of confronting it.
We tell ourselves that we love our parents too much to see them suffer. But is our love honourable if it doesn’t involve sacrifice? Perhaps this conflict is my inheritance. My parents were never in the position to be the primary caregivers for their own parents. Their siblings took over. They don’t speak about it, but I know it haunts them. I suspect they feel like they abandoned their folks in a beige hospital room. I suspect they feel like shirkers. The ending of Leah, in that regard, offers a bittersweet resolution for the ages. Leah chooses to equip her younger version with the knowledge to find a cure and, by virtue of the butterfly effect, wipe out her own existence. She chooses to forfeit her successful future to change the past — and prevent her mother from getting the disease. As a result, Leah circumvents the pressure of caregiving as well as the remorse of abandonment. She opts for a timeline that allows her to be a daughter again. One that permits her to feel alive. One that requires her to vanish in order to arrive, and perish in order to survive.
It got me thinking. Would I give up everything I am, and everyone I’m going to become, to reverse the loneliness of my parents? Would I renounce my identity to see them happy, healthy and maybe even together again? The answer isn’t easy. It’s not supposed to be. Because the real question is: Is love even meant to be honourable? Love is the courage to be self-seeking, but it’s also the privilege to be rueful. Maybe I’ll unearth the truth in the coming years. After all, I’m still in the past. There’s no cure yet, because there’s no malady. Writing about my parents is my time machine, my Paris and my documentary. It’s my way of remembering my father and mother — and leaving them — while they’re still with me. It’s also my way of forgiving — and dismantling — my future self.
Read more from 'The Viewfinder' series here.
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