Writers: Anna Mottram and Jon Sanders
Director: Jon Sanders
Jon Sanders’s A Clever Woman is an enigmatic, intriguing film about mourning with a powerful atmosphere of brooding stillness. Phoebe (Tanya Myers) and Dot (Josie Lawrence) are sisters, both performance artists, clearing out their mother’s home a year after her death. She had been a successful composer and musician; the house is full of paintings, books and musical instruments, including a Steinway pianola for which she composed settings of the Victorian poet, Mary Coleridge. A young flautist, Tom (a sympathetic James Northcote) has been house-sitting and has got the pianola to function, playing it for Phoebe and Dot as they practise the mother’s song, A Clever Woman. An older woman, Monica (Anna Mottram) is working with them. It emerges she is helping the sisters with a site-specific performance they are planning as a memorial for their mother. Phoebe and Dot treat Monica with a certain condescension. We are intrigued by the possibilities of her relationship to their deceased parents.
Many of the scenes work as extended meditations on questions of how individual lives turn out as they do. The actors improvise the dialogue, creating an effectively naturalistic style. Their conversations, with their silences, pauses and sudden bursts of laughter, feel as if we’re overhearing real people. With this style there can be no heavy handed exposition, so part of the film’s fascination is in only gradually learning details of the sisters’ upbringing. Phoebe and Dot spend time pulling their mother’s clothes from a wardrobe. They ruefully admit that neither of them can get into the glamorous evening dresses she wore to perform, but they have a go, nonetheless. There is something comically childlike about this dressing up: Dot sniffs a frock to detect her mother’s perfume; Phoebe stumbles around in her high heels. But there is a troubling sense too of the extent to which these middle-aged women are overly invested in the myth of their childhood. They’re overly entitled too, barely clearing anything. We see them discussing old toys while in the background Monica and Tom lug around large pieces of furniture. Having done almost nothing in the morning, they feel the need to take an extended break on the blustery beach.
While there, they wonder about the real tension in the family – how could their father have put up with their mother’s blatant infidelities? He used to obediently take the girls to that same beach every Sunday so that she could entertain one or other lover. There’s a nice piece of irony when they later realise that another illicit relationship is currently going on under their own roof. Only late in the film do we see Dot’s capacity for hysterical anger – convincingly portrayed by Lawrence. Myers, on the other hand, makes Phoebe a more sympathetic character, reverting to childish protective mechanisms, by hiding from Dot in a bedroom cupboard.
David Scott’s strong cinematographic style complements the deliberately elliptical narrative, the camera refusing to offer close up of faces and expressions. Instead it is often fixed, staring, as it were, into the middle ground. We glimpse characters as they walk by and must make sense of it as best we can.
It’s an accomplished and highly watchable film, but it never quite comes clean about what we are to make of the sisters’ grief. It is undoubtedly portrayed with sensitivity, but are we meant to interpret their retreat into the comforts of childhood as a sign of irreparable damage or applaud their apparent journey to understanding? Towards the end there are some disappointingly sentimental prods towards the latter interpretation.
A Clever Woman was screened at Edinburgh Film Festival between 15th-17th August and will be in UK Cinemas later this year.
