QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
The difference between a Barbie doll and a 30-something is that nothing bad happens to the toy when you throw it to the ground. You can also more easily pull the legs off a doll, Liv’s (Ieva Segliņa) new stepdaughter informs her. The twisted insight is one only a kid can have, but it also nails the emotional labour of an existential crisis. The translated title of Alise Zariņa’s new film, Flesh, Blood, Even a Heart, summarises this interaction with a triad of distinguishing qualities between human and toy. It’s the “heart” part that Zariņa’s feature tugs on the most.
When we are young, our first breakups and best friend drama carry the weight of the world. They feel so much bigger than they are. Flesh, Blood, Even a Heart admits that the small things never stop feeling so important. Life is nothing but small things. For Liv, body insecurity, a lack of intimacy with her husband, confusing instructions from a hospital receptionist, and even a broken washing machine bring back her inner child. The world feels like it stops when an existential crisis starts, and that doesn’t change whether you’re a prepubescent girl or a mid-career woman.
The title also names the three largest anxieties in Liv’s life: flesh (sexuality and body image), blood (health), and heart (love and family). These are also the three primary subjects of the environment created by production designer Juris Žukovskis. Her husband, Marcis (Gatis Maliks), is also entering his own midlife crisis and his is fuelled by an insecure masculinity and the parental stress of having a young daughter who doesn’t live with him. Moving back and forth between crowded hospital rooms and a cluttered home, the photography passes from N95 respirators and surgical masks to washing clothes and bathroom sex. These two dominant settings are broken up by memories of her past, including a few traumatic ones of her quasi-pornographer father at work photographing young women.
Cinematographer Mārtiņš Jurēvics uses a European widescreen in order to tightly control the horizon of the world. It’s just more difficult to be too optimistic when the characters fumble around between pillar boxes instead of confidently sauntering through the visually represented potentialities of a full widescreen. The narrower aspect ratio makes for reduced possibilities, especially when Jurēvics almost exclusively employs it in crowded interiors. Added grain comes damn close to replicating actual film grain – a decision that ups the seriousness of the drama while also reminding viewers of the past that Liv can’t shake.
The film had its world premiere on Latvia’s Independence Day (Proclamation Day of the Republic of Latvia) and although, at a glance, it appears entirely apolitical, Zariņa subtly uses reminders of Latvia’s political past (and present) in order to to situate Liv’s mid-life crisis. She inadvertently compares her dad to Putin when she says, “I don’t want anybody to die. Besides Putin, probably”. while thinking about her probable demise. She even grammatically confuses the two negative figures as she keeps talking about them before jokingly clarifying that both Putin and her father are largely impersonal figures in her life.
The most brazen political component is the brutalist maze of a hospital where her father spends his last days. The hospital is decrepit and impossible to navigate; it’s clearly understaffed and underkept, itself a commentary on post-Soviet Latvia. As if they were a maze, Liv gets lost in the hallways every time she visits. The act of visiting her past – her estranged father – puts her in a liminal space. And all this is, in part, signalled through the colossal brutalist architecture, a style that, for better or for worse, has been married to the USSR in the Eastern European imagination.
Flesh, Blood, Even a Heart just premiered in the Baltic Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
