It is, again, a pleasure and a privilege to feature reviews by Kenneth R. Morefield, who has made it to the Toronto International Film Festival.
Here’s the first review he’s sent our way…
Apron Strings
I could, I suppose, pick on Apron Strings for a second half that is a little too cluttered, a script that is just half a click overwritten, and a couple of too predictable plot twists designed more to create parallelism than to develop characters. But, when Sima Urale’s first full-length film is clicking, which is often enough to get by, it approaches attaining a Sayles-like quality in the way it shows various segments of a culture while avoiding many of the caricaturizing or stock characteristics too often associated with an ensemble piece.
The film follows two families, each negotiating the limits of tolerance and acceptance.
Anita is a New Zealander of Indian descent who has been ostracized for many years from her family as a result of having returned pregnant from time spent overseas. Despite being cut off from her culture, she is still trapped by it. The success of her cooking show depends as much on her dressing up Indian (like she is playing The Jewel and the Crown, she laments) and participating in a sort of culinary Orientalism that champions as exotic and new all those parts of her life and identity that she finds stale and burdensome. Anita’s sister, Tara, from whom she is estranged, has inherited their parents’ fruit shop and converted it to a curry shop. She plays Anita’s show in the background and makes derisive comments, but her bitterness (which reveals itself gradually) is directed as much towards the community that rejected her by proxy as it is towards her sister whose scandalous behavior became the catalyst for her own rejection at the hand of the Indian community.
When Anita’s son, Michael, now a young man curious about his Indian roots takes a job at Tara’s shop (without telling her his true identity), he comes to a greater understanding of the paradox of community and family‚Äîthe simultaneous ability to oppress and love as no one else can.
That may sound like enough for a film, and it would be, but Apron Strings expands its scope to include a second family. Lorna, the proprietor of a cake shop, lives with her elderly mother and deadbeat, gambling addicted son. Lorna is aware that she is an enabler, even before her (pregnant unmarried) daughter returns to the neighborhood to tell her, but she is also wracked by guilt at the fact that she threw her husband out for the same problem—with tragic repercussions.
And if all that sounds like a bit too much is going on… well, it is. But (perhaps having to do with the fact that she has roots in theater) Urale is more interested in character than plot, and that is the film’s saving grace. The actors are all terrific, especially Scott Wills as Barry (the deadbeat son) and Jennifer Ludlam as Lorna. Each has a role that could easily have been made into or portrayed as a stereotype, but it is to the film’s credit that it allows its characters a measure of self-awareness and, hence, depth.
Although Urale joked in her question and answer session about having a small budget (the equivalent of about one million Canadian dollars) which forced her to make some concessions to how scenes were shot (a lot of close ups) she wisely insisted on shooting with film rather than video, and the result is that the palette of the film is just more nuanced and better able to visually represent the intersection of different cultures.
I also appreciated that the film was able to take a neutral, non-judgmental tone towards its characters without being clinical. So many works don’t trust their audience to understand moral complexity and hence weigh the grievances that characters have too heavily on one side or another. Anita can be selfish and self-centered, but she does accept her son’s sexual orientation and allows him freedom to pursue his Indian roots even though she would prefer he didn’t. Lorna borders on (or crosses into, depending on your point of view) racist sentiments when she talks about those people and how she can smell the stench of curry all the way down the block, but she also shows herself able to confront her faults and make steps towards changing. I especially liked the fact that the minorities in the film were not overly idealized. In any film with this many characters there will be lots of ways in which the characters have multiple foils. The issue of genetic determinism is raised, interestingly, not with the gay son but with the gambler, and although the film doesn’t belabor the point, it does show that there is a world of difference between believing someone has no choice over some aspect of his behavior and believing that he is not responsible for it.
Finally, I’m just a sucker for movies about food. I love it when films that have characters who purport to care deeply about something take the time to get the little details about the things they care about right so that we can come to sense something of why the characters care about it the way they do. There is a small moment towards the end of the film where the two sisters, long estranged, find themselves standing over a countertop, falling into inescapable patterns of kneading and folding. Rituals and traditions, whether they be familial or cultural, can give us something to fall back on when we don’t know what to do but only know that we must do it together… when we know or suspect that our presence is the most important thing we have to give.
My Grade: B+
Kenneth R. Morefield is an Assistant Professor of English at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina.
