Cette Maison | Little White Lies

Cette Mai­son

04 Nov 2022

Young woman in a blue top smiling surrounded by lush greenery and vibrant flowers.
Young woman in a blue top smiling surrounded by lush greenery and vibrant flowers.
3

Anticipation.

An imagined biography promises to cultivate a surreal account of life and death.

5

Enjoyment.

Sharp, intimate and tactful.

5

In Retrospect.

An accomplished debut signalling Miryam Charles as a filmmaker to look out for.

Miryam Charles’ debut is a stun­ning dra­ma that takes direct inspi­ra­tion from her cous­in’s unex­pect­ed death.

Shot in sump­tu­ous and hazy 16mm film, Hait­ian-Cana­di­an film­mak­er Miryam Charles’ debut fea­ture attempts a flu­id jour­ney in time and space – across Haiti, Con­necti­cut and Que­bec – that coa­lesces in an elu­sive reimag­in­ing of Black girl­hood. Cette Mai­son takes the death of the filmmaker’s 14 year old cousin and imag­i­na­tive­ly recon­structs her mem­o­ry through per­son­al, gen­er­a­tional and geo­graph­ic remenisces.

The sto­ry­telling leans into mag­i­cal real­ism and evokes the qual­i­ties of what cul­tur­al his­to­ri­an Saidiya Hart­man calls crit­i­cal fab­u­la­tion” — a blend of fact and fic­tion through the use of imag­i­na­tion and empa­thy, where past, present and future are spa­tiotem­po­ral­ly inter­twined with fan­ta­sy. Charles con­fi­dent­ly con­structs a coun­ternar­ra­tive that elab­o­rates on the gaps and con­flict­ing details with­in police and autop­sy reports, savour­ing unknowa­bil­i­ty by way of inter­ro­gat­ing, recov­er­ing and restor­ing lost poten­tial­i­ties with­in a sto­ry that is impos­si­ble to tell”.

A Brecht­ian ded­i­ca­tion to arti­fice is immense­ly dif­fi­cult to pull off on screen, but Charles’ mise-en-scène is remark­ably reflex­ive, as imag­ined encoun­ters are trans­lat­ed into bold and evoca­tive visu­al assem­blages. The result is lumi­nes­cent. Per­son­al trau­ma, vio­lence, grief and loss are not mere­ly con­front­ed. They become paving stones to forg­ing a path that allows the film to trav­el through the com­plex­i­ties of its res­o­nant emo­tion­al core and blos­som into a spec­tral, genre-defy­ing enigma.

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