QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

In keeping with its title, Linas Mikuyta’s Paradise Not Lost opens with an idyll – indeed two of them. First there is Gabriel on a lakeside beach with his mother Jūratė, who reads him a fairytale and dances with him on the shore in the fading light. Second there is the Edenic woodland garden where the two join Gabriel’s dad Juozukas in order to celebrate Father’s Day surrounded by greenery, flowers and calm. These are safe, protected spaces, full of love for Gabriel, who is profoundly autistic and almost entirely non-verbal along with other special needs and requires constant care. Yet there is also trouble in Paradise, already implicitly marked by Juozukas’ absence from the littoral opening. Jūratė and the older Juozukas are splitting up, and their fairytale marriage is not going to end with a “happily ever after”, and so both have to navigate a new world in exile from the protective haven of family, without disrupting Gabriel’s routines.

Those words might seem to be over-egging a religious metaphor, but then both Jūratė and Juozukas are deeply steeped in spiritual matters, as enthusiastic members of the Orthodox Church in Lithuania, while also occasionally dabbling in Taoism and Krishnaism. Their lives are punctuated with ritual practices, and Jūratė in particular insists that Gabriel is “God’s child” – an idea which is reinforced by the image of him resting with his head in his mother’s lap beneath a painted pietà on a church column, with either image seeming a reflection of the other. Gabriel too is drawn to the Church’s scared paraphernalia, although it is not clear whether this attraction is so very different than his fixation on dolls and playing figures, or indeed whether his dressing up as a sacristan and parading around the garden with a cross and religious banner that Jūratė has helped him fashion represents anything more than cosplay. After all, Gabriel cannot speak for himself.

In Mikuyta’s intimate documentary, Jūratė in fact does most of the talking (and mostly in voiceover), while Juozukas speaks direct to camera later in the film as the split becomes more bitter and permanent, and his loneliness comes to the fore. Jūratė is lonely too, but seeks to temper that with a closer relationship to God – and so both parents, in their way, are confronted with philosophical, even theological questions about our place and role in a vast, possibly unforgiving universe. Jūratė expressly extends, towards the end, her thoughts about isolation to her son, as she wonders aloud what might be his fate if he were, in the natural order of things, to outlive her. Will the same God who gifted her with Gabriel also protect him when she is gone? It is a harrowing question, which of course Gabriel himself cannot answer – but in this film’s final sequence, prefigured by the underwater animation that accompanied the opening credits, Mikuyta finds a visual key to Gabriel’s experience and understanding of the world around him: for Gabriel is shown walking through the glass tunnel of an aquarium, full of delight and awe for the alien fish all around him, even as his mother, who is at first with him, recedes from the frame, so that we last see him all alone, lost at sea.

Beautifully shot by Kristina Sereikaitė with an eye for the details of the natural world, Paradise Not Lost spans several seasons, all orchestrated to Linas Rimša’s grand electro-symphonic score. Even as Gabriel comes of age, requiring Jūratė to shave his emerging facial hair, he remains innocent and unchanging within his own domestic environment. Yet along with his body, both the universe around him, and even the very fabric of his own family, does and will change, raising the agonising spectre that this hermetic bubble must inevitable burst, and paradise, though perhaps not yet lost, eventually will be.

Paradise Not Lost just premiered in the Baltic Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.