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Fourteen
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Two longtime friends, Jo (Norma Kuhling) and Mara
(Tallie Medel), walk down a New York street together. Jo pulls out the money
she owes, and Mara darts her eyes around anxiously, hoping that nobody is
looking. During the same walk, Mara talks and doesn’t even notice when Jo
suddenly darts in and out of a shop for a snack.
These details tell us, simply and economically,
everything about the central characters of Dan Sallitt’s Fourteen. Jo is a “difficult”, impulsive, unpredictable, sometimes
unstable friend for Mara – who is the more solid of the pair, but also a little
cold, withdrawn, resentful of the emotional demands made on her.
And what is Jo’s problem, ultimately? Mental illness,
childhood trauma, drug dependence, family influences, a string of ill-chosen
partners or bad relationships? She thinks it all started when she was 14 … but (as
she herself says) maybe that was just puberty, as everybody experiences and
more-or-less survives it. What makes Jo so special in her trouble? The film
critiques our reflex tendency to diagnose or type people. Only in the complex
push-and-pull of interpersonal relations – with the web of mutual blame and
responsibilities they create – does anything make any sense.
Commentators love to compare Sallitt´s work (including
his previous The Unspeakable Act [2012], also featuring
Medel) with Éric Rohmer, Hong Sang-soo, Philippe Garrel … and, since he is an
erudite cinephile and critic, all such associations are permitted. But by this,
his fourth feature since 1998, Sallitt has surely won the right to be
considered in his own terms. His manner is observational and compassionate, but
also asks us to be attentive, to work at understanding.
Fourteen skips ahead through a period
of years without the usual signposting of milestones and passing times. When
Mara’s partner, Adam (C. Mason Wells), enters the apartment and greets her and
their child, it’s up to us to figure out where they are at in the chronicle of
their time together. Just as when Jo suddenly reappears on the street in Mara’s
sight – seemingly replaced by a new best friend. And like when Mara finally
cracks emotionally in the film’s sad epilogue: an emotion
that is, as always in life (and death), too little and too much, too soon and
too late.
© Adrian Martin 24 July 2019 |
