SONGS MY BROTHERS TAUGHT ME
CHLOE ZHAO
****
Chloé Zhao's first feature Songs My Brothers Taught Me is a remarkable cinematic immersion into a First Nation's reservation community, and a subtle form of social realism suggestive of decades worth of experience.
Running time: 90 MINS.
A near unanimous chorus of praise has been showered upon Chloé Zhao this year for her Oscar-sweeping feature Nomadland, and deservedly so. The films stars the rough eccentricities of Frances McDormand, who joins a community of rubber-tramps rumbling in rusty RV's across the expansive deserts of rural North America, supporting themselves with temporary seasonal contracts. I was, like critics and audience's alike, touched by the gentle sensitivity, unwavering respect and emotional intimacy through which we enter this world.
Zhao's gift is to observe and capture the textures that build both place and person to such profundity that they take on a near-spiritual quality, gliding the camera across vast landscapes and cluttered interiors with a delicacy our eyes seem to have forgotten. Yet where Nomadland is a gentle paddle in the shallows of Zhao's auteurship, Songs My Brothers Taught Me is a head-first dive into its depths. This film is a remarkable cinematic immersion and a subtle form of social realism suggestive of decades worth of experience. The fact, then, that this is Zhao's first feature somehow elevates Songs to another level of significance.
Set entirely within the limits of Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, Songs is a collaboration with one of North America's most under-represented communities, both on screen and in a wider socio-economic context. First Nations peoples have fought for centuries against white-settler structures working to erase indigenous livelihoods, cultures and languages, and the Pine Ridge reservation bears many of these scars. As the site of the 1890 massacre of Lakota people, Zhao does not shy away from capturing the physical degradation - of houses, buildings, roads and schools - that mark this as a space suffering from political erasure.
Zhao's gift is to observe and capture the textures that build both place and person to such profundity that they take on a near-spiritual quality, gliding the camera across vast landscapes and cluttered interiors with a delicacy our eyes have forgotten.
Still from Song My Brothers Taught Me. Photograph: Publicity image
Yet what makes Zhao's film such a vital disruption of cinematic convention is that it is exactly that: a collaboration. Zhao spent four years living on the reservation, listening to stories, participating as a community member, engaging with complex issues and discriminatory policies affecting the inhabitants, as well as with the dreams, hopes and joys they enjoy. Much like in Nomadland, the characters are simply playing estimations of themselves; every room, street, church and classroom feels as 'real' or unedited as even the most vérité of documentary. The success of this ethnographic-style process is, then, that we care more deeply and with a newly formed empathy about the characters - not least of all Jashaun and Johnny, the sibling duo at the heart of this film.
At just 11years old, Jashaun holds a quiet wisdom, whilst her total adoration of her older brother, Johnny, is the emotional thread loosely weaving the narrative together. Johnny is nearly finished with high-school and is planning to follow his sweet-heart Aurelia to LA where she has been accepted to study. With an older brother in prison and a mother consumed by an alcohol addiction, Johnny is left with the responsibility of looking after Jashuan and finding the cash to get by. Tragically, he does this by selling bootleg alcohol - illegal on the reservation for the destruction it has caused and continues to bring to post-colonial First Nations communities.
The early sequences in which Jashaun and Johnny fill long afternoons with play - racing through the dusty, mars-like rock formations that decorate the South Dakota desert, covering the walls in sticky blue painted handprints, and boxing together in the yard - are treasured as glimpses of a childhood that is all too quickly vanishing with the intrusion of adulthood. And they are not alone. The news that their absent rodeo-cowboy father has died in a fire brings all 25 of his children together at the funeral, many of whom had barely ever met him. This reunion spirals into a montage of icorssing pathways for many of the siblings.
One of the most intriguing relationships is that of Jashaun and Mo - a tattoo artist and recovering addict trying to sell his textile creations on the bonnet of his car. With an impressively mature entrepreneurial spirit, Jashuan offers to work as his assistant in return for her prom dress - a beautiful red tasseled creation that Jashuan discovers in the wake of Mo's arrest. At this point, it's hard not to view almost all of Jashuan's relationships, and in particular those with men, as a series of crushing abandonments, and as we anticipate the departure of her brother, the weight of her isolation feels crushing.
One of the main criticisms voiced against the film is that the plot itself too loosely meanders from one frame to the next without narrative drive or dramatic pacing. Yet others praise this 'poetic minimalism' (Variety) achieved by cinematographer Joshua James Richards, whose camera navigates textures and details as if they were characters themselves. In one particularly evocative scene we follow flaming lines of grass, cutting their way across a semi-apocalyptic landscape the night Johnny's car gets set on fire.
"Anything that runs wild has got something bad in them. You want to leave some of that in there, because they need it to survive"
Johnny, Songs My Brother Taught Me
Still from Songs My Brothers Taught Me. Photograph: Publicity image
In a typically understated, reflective ending, Johnny rejects his brothers advice to "escape the res", and instead begins a re-signification of his home. So where Nomadland is a 'road-movie' that seeks constant movement as the basis of its journey, Songs holds its central characters in locational stasis, and after so much struggle and disappointment, it is truly extraordinary that this decision to stay is somehow also a celebration; that is to say, a recognition of what is true and beautiful amidst pain and suffering. Zhao so wonderfully refuses the 'happy ever after' we might hope for, just as she refuses its inverse: to denigrate these characters as victims. Rather, their lives are understood as full of contrasting forces over which they both do and don't have power - what matters, and what this film really asks of us, is to look, closely and with eyes open; to see this multiplicity within the rich, detailed texture of their lives.
"My sister, Jashaun, she's got a thing about this place. She sees things I don't. She's a good one. Whenever the storms are comin', the old timers would teach us to watch the clouds, and when the wind is too strong, we all know to lean into it, so it don't blow us away. "
Johnny, Songs My Brother Taught Me