Italian
Three generations of women confront the elephant in their room — a stepfather’s sexual abuse — in Chloe Abrahams’ “The Taste of Mango.” The filmmaker’s first feature reflects her background in gallery video art as it mixes impressionistic visuals, diaristic elements, home movies and other factors into a documentary that prioritizes emotional clarity over reportage. It’s an unusually affirming, poetic treatment of difficult subject matter that stresses resilience and healing over trauma. After gathering some festival prizes, it opens in New York and Los Angeles theaters this week, which broadcast on PBS’ “POV” planned for April 28.
The title comes from Abrahams’ awareness that both her mother Rozana and grandmother Jean aka “Nana” consumed voluminous amounts of that fruit while pregnant — so the director “tastes” it when thinking of them. But one sweet detail can’t fully mask a fair amount of bitter experience in this maternal line. Those backstories only emerge in fragmentary, non-chronological form during the film’s brief yet unhurried, seemingly stream-of-consciousness course.
In her native Sri Lanka, Nana was first married to “the only man who loved and protected her.” But that love match ended tragically when he died at age 27. Eventually she remarried, providing young Rozana with a stepfather … unfortunately. Occasionally glimpsed in old photos or videos (he duly walked her down the wedding aisle), that person is a subject grandma is reluctant to discuss, despite remaining his partner four decades later. We glean he’s been verbally and physically violent, and useless as a household provider. He even did a stint in prison, for reasons presumably having to do with the term “pedophile” that is used here more than once. Most horrifically, his stepdaughter was raped as an 11-year-old. The incident got hushed up, because Jean was afraid of the public “shame if people knew” it had happened.
Popular on Variety Her perspective, indeed, is sometimes maddening — and apparently has been even more so in the past. No doubt in part to flee this man (whom she’s furious at having her long-distance funds partially support), Rozana moved to the U.K. when pregnant with Chloe, whose father she divorced some years later. But she still suffered night terrors, sleepwalking and other signs of PTSD. When Nana visited, she was critical of the younger family members, while evading the topic of her own continued habitation with a “monster,” let alone his traumatizing deeds. Even during the more relaxed recent trip that occupies much screentime here, she excuses him with classic blame-the-victim logic: “If a young girl is frisky and wants to give something, men will take anytime,” she shrugs.
Nonetheless, at this late point, all three women are edging toward the kinds of frank discussion they’ve needed for much of their lives. (The film’s astutely narrowed focus doesn’t actually allow anyone else a word, even in archival clips.) Rozana has long wanted Jeab to abandon her “instinct for sacrifice,” leave the loathed stepfather and join her progeny for good in England. At the film’s close, it seems that leap has finally been made.
Despite such heavy shared baggage, the trio is capable of a collective joie de vivre amply displayed in scenes of them horsing around in silly wigs, or singing along to the old American country and western songs (“I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” “Stand by Your Man,” etc.) Nana inexplicably loves.
We get little or no insight into their relationships, professional lives or anything else outside this matriarchal triangle. But “Taste of Mango” feels fluid and free within its chosen thematic bounds. Abrahams uses visual abstraction —notably recurrent views of running water — to add a meditative, universal dimension to familial biographical content. And the deployment of voiceover by all parties concerned heightens further the film’s feel of accessible personal exploration.
The sum effect is at once densely textured and appealingly direct, its experimental aspects only serving to communicate more vividly the bonds tested but also strengthened by great adversity. “Mango” tells a story that could have been told many different ways. Still, the path chosen feels unique — not least for conveying some awful truths by means palatable even to the most skittish viewer. It’s a peek down a long, dark tunnel that’s nonetheless suffused throughout by the light at its end.
