Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Vera Brunner-Sung
Starring: Wa Yang, Qu Kue, April Charlo, Gia Vang
That bittersweet period after a breakup of a once seemingly locked in
relationship has its own special ennui. A form of grieving wherein one
steps outside a life that, up until recently, was all you knew; if
existence is a drama then the central imperative, the reason for keeping
going, has been suddenly replaced with a new and unwelcome disequilibrium.
Can you be bothered to resolve it? It seems like so much hard work, so
much effort to start again. And for what? Just so you can again experience
this heartache later down the line? Again this weightlessness in the
absence of gravity, where, emancipated from the rest of the world, it
feels like you could do anything, yet you don't want to because nothing
really matters? Jog on.
This is the situation in which Hmong-American Lue (Wa Yang) finds
himself in Vera Brunner-Sung's superbly crafted
Bitterroot. He spends his evenings at a karaoke bar, straight faced intoning Paul
Young's 'Everytime You Go Away', and his days as a janitor. That is until
he is laid off. It never rains, but it pours. Except, actually, it doesn't
even do that in Bitteroot's rocky mise-en-scene. The still heat of northwest America is a tangibly
oppressive aspect of this slow burn character study, with Brunner-Sung
placing Lue against a vast rural Montana landscape, the huge existential
mountains and encroaching forest fires visually expressive of his lonely,
yet somehow urgent, situation.
Lue, understandably, wants to be left alone. He wanders the woods, and
goes fishing, occasionally shooting the shit with his mates in the Hmong
community: Brunner-Sung communicates Lue via archetypal masculine
contexts, emphasising his own loss of male agency. Like a ghost he haunts
his own life, yet no man is an island, and Lue reluctantly has to engage
with his family and their farm. His mother is ailing, and, in her twilight
years, urges her son to find another partner (because it is that easy,
mum) while his sister's husband is overriding the running of the alfalfa
rows. Things intensify when Lue's mother falls critically ill, and Lue
must face up to the sort of emotions he has been trying to avoid in the
interim.
What impresses most profoundly about Bitterroot is the
film's pristine confidence. There is no rush here, but trust in the
narrative and the cast. Ki Jin Kim's photography of the surrounding
nature is pensive but also cathartic; a perceptively consuming testament
that life, as ever, keeps moving. The character interactions are
devastatingly free of histrionics, with Brunner-Sung's direction gleaning
so much from even the smallest of gestures from her very good cast. Could
there be hope for Lue in the form of an attractive neighbour who lives in
a nearby trailer? Her dog barking keeps him awake at night, so perhaps not
the best of starts. But this is a neat correlation of the fallacy of Lue's
outlook, where although he may try to be isolated, to divorce himself from
the world and all attendant emotion, life will nonetheless find him again.
