A 52-year-old woman decides to move out of her family home and take an apartment alone. She has no apparent reason for doing so: her husband isn’t violent, she isn’t unfaithful, and she isn’t going anywhere in particular. She simply decides that she is no longer content with the daily indignities, quarrels and ingratitudes of caring for a large family. This is the premise of Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß’s new film My Happy Family, in which one woman’s simple act of independence ripples darkly through both the household she left behind and their wider social circle.
There are plentiful examples across cultures and literatures of women who abandon their families. Perhaps the most well-known of these is Nora, a traditionally domestic wife and mother who, at the end of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, decides to strike out on her own, leaving her husband and children behind. Nineteenth-century audiences were so appalled by this that alternative endings to the play were written, in which this decision never takes place. It would be nice to be able to look back on this example and congratulate ourselves on how remote societal anxieties about women and their independence seem now. But stories like this still have the power to intrigue us because these anxieties are really not that remote: the figure of the woman who choses independence in this way is a spectre that continues to haunt the patriarchal imagination. My Happy Family depicts the particular prejudices and expectations of modern day Georgia, but wherever you are in the world, the idea of married women, particularly mothers, seeking to carve out their own space still makes people uncomfortable.
We first see Manana, our protagonist, trailing a brisk estate agent through her new flat. It’s dingy: the elevator is broken and the walls could use a few layers of paint. The estate agent apologises for the poor state of the flat, but Manana doesn’t really seem to be listening. Her only requirement is that this apartment is hers and hers alone. This calm and sparse space is contrasted brilliantly with Manana’s family home. Here, there is a constant friction between the chaos of a large, multigenerational group of people living in a confined space and the hundreds of tiny rules that govern their lives in that space. These rules are often played out over food: Manana’s mother snaps at her grandson about eating from the fridge, at Manana for having cake before dinner and chastises various people for buying the wrong groceries. Ekvtimishvili and Groß choreograph these domestic scenes perfectly: people weave around one another, shuffle in and out of doorways, alternately eavesdropping and yelling to other parts of the house. Tudor Vladimir Panduru’s cinematography intensifies the claustrophobia of these scenes: the camera is unsteady, following people over their shoulders at an almost intrusively close range. He also worked on Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation, another film in which the shots convey a total lack of interior space to breathe. Unbeknownst to her family at this point, Manana signs for her new flat and returns home, where her husband, Soso, has invited a clown-car of guests for Manana’s birthday, against her wishes. It does not matter what she wants: there is a birthday and therefore there will be guests. This is another family rule that must not be queried, let alone broken.
This is Ekvtimishvili and Groß’s second feature together. In Bloom (2013) depicts teenage girls in 1992 Tbilisi, and My Happy Family feels like a natural progression: a further exploration of the complex social ballet performed daily by women in Georgian society. Entire families live under one roof, acquiring and shedding residents as people die, marry and have children. In My Happy Family it’s made clear that while this keeps people physically close together, it can also create a deep emotional resentment that pushes them apart. The grandmother of the household complains about cleaning “the same thing every day” and the grandfather says matter of factly that he would like to be dead. This is the future Manana has to look forward to.
We are not surprised, then, to learn that Manana aches for a room of her own. Not so her family, who press her throughout the film for her reason for leaving them. Surely, her brother-in-law accuses her, someone is supporting her financially in her new apartment. She must be “seeing someone”. Or perhaps, as her son and daughter think, someone has done something to upset her in the family, and they set about hunting down the culprit. “Tell us who hurt you”, her uncles and aunts demand. This aspect of Ekvtimshvili’s screenplay is particularly well-pitched: a middle aged woman must have a concrete reason for wanting to leave her family. Manana doesn’t have one, and this is what unnerves people most. She is not cold and heartless: she calls her daughter to check in on her and returns to the family home to help out with various family issues. In other words, her decision to live alone is never painted as a decision to abandon her role as a mother and a daughter. The appeal of Manana as a character and of My Happy Family as a film is that a woman can be both independent and dependable.
Manana’s triumph is partial. Although we see her in her flat, music playing gently on the stereo, eating a slice of cake with the balcony doors open to the wind, or practicing the guitar, singing, planting tomatoes, her family and her community aren’t going to let her get away this easily. Her brother-in-law insists that some local guys he knows keep watch over her, while her husband invites himself over in order to help her put up some shelves. A revelation about her husband midway through the film throws her newfound peace once again into disarray. But ultimately she does not return to the family home, despite remaining a part of the life of her family and her community. In many ways, her role is unchanged – there’s a great extended scene in which she attends a school reunion, catching up with old friends; in another, she consoles her daughter on not yet being pregnant after a year of marriage. Family life, Ekvtimishvili and Groß seem to say, goes on, and perhaps even goes on better, when people are not confined together within four walls. But there is no easy conclusion to Manana’s story: the film ends abruptly and on an ambiguous note. We’re not sure, by the end of the film, what Manana’s future life will look like, and like her family members, we want assurances that cannot necessarily be given.
