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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 168 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 168, October 1993.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Passion Fish
Dir: John Sayles
Anyone familiar with previous John Sayles films like Matewan or City of Hope will recognise the way in which he manages to convey a real sense of optimism without ever lapsing into sentimentality whatever his subject. This latest film continues the tradition.
A soap opera star, May-Alice (Mary McDonnell), becomes paralysed from the waist down after a horrific car accident in New York. The film opens with her waking sense of panic and terror as she realises the scale of her injury. She decides to return to the now empty family home in Louisiana to drown her sorrows in wine and play out her days slumped on a couch watching wall to wall television with the remote control switch as her ‘umbilical cord’.
A series of live-in nurses are sent from an agency to care for her, but they seem to be more concerned with their own domestic dramas than with their patient. This, combined with an increasingly cantankerous and uncompliant May-Alice, ensures that none of them stay very long. They are succeeded by Chantelle (Alfre Woodard), a young black nurse from Chicago. She needs regular employment because of her turbulent past, but she is not prepared to become servile or to be treated as a skivvy.
This is where the real drama begins. Chantelle has a professional determination to develop whatever muscular movement is possible in her patient so that she can become less reliant on her nurse. But May-Alice has become trapped in a haze of alcohol-induced self-indulgence and refuses to take easily to the regime of self-reliance. Chantelle, however, doesn’t flinch and won’t allow herself to be intimidated.
The ensuing conflict doesn’t shrink from exploring some of the worst aspects of paralysis like incontinence and sexual frustration and this exploration highlights the determination of Chantelle to make her patient more able to look after herself.
One of the greatest strengths of the film is the way in which Sayles controls its pace. The initial horror and panic in New York gives way to a painful and increasingly intense sense of claustrophobia in the Louisiana living room. This in turn shifts dramatically as Chantelle gets to work and the scenes shift to external locations like the garden, the small town, the photographic dark room and above all the swamps.
When May-Alice is given an old Leica camera by a wayward uncle on a drunken visit, she finds in photography a real sense of fulfilment and interest. She is gradually able to break out of her mental and physical prison. In perhaps the most memorable scene the two women are taken on a boat trip round the swamp. For Chantelle, the city girl, it is a captivating and unnerving experience. For May-Alice it is a homecoming that reawakens in her a very strong sense of the past that she has never allowed to leave her.
This is visual storytelling at its very best. Sayles has written about the three components in film making (script, acting and visual imagery) and has argued that the last is often the hardest to achieve particularly in the low budget films that he cut his teeth on. Here he is able to marry the three to perfection. The dialogue is typically sharp and often witty and the main actors are given enough space to develop complex roles.
Sayles manages to sustain the women’s relationship as the central focus of the film even when they both establish warm friendships with men. There are no white knights coming to the rescue and there is no glib and unconvincing conclusion for the benefit of the Hollywood bankers.
The soundtrack is based on a wealth of original cajun songs and melodies, a rich mixture of different cultural traditions which reinforce the strong sense of place established by the visual imagery. There are few films that you don’t want to end. This is one. Don’t miss it.
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