Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn’s The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open follows a day in the life of two women: Áila and Rosie. These characters meet on a street in Vancouver, Canada: Áila (Tailfeathers) is on her way home from work when she sees the pregnant Rosie (Violet Nelson), barefoot and bruised, walking away from her abusive partner’s home. Áila offers Rosie support, inviting her back to her apartment for a moment of respite and a change of dry clothes. There the women speak and discover sources of connection and dissonance. Frequent silences and moments of awkwardness underline the challenge of accepting that support may necessarily involve mutual vulnerability.
A TV Guide summary of The Body Remembers would probably describe it as two women grappling with the complexity of domestic abuse, likely also noting that the protagonists come from different Indigenous backgrounds. This kind of synopsis would be true, yet conjures clichéd narratives of drama, trauma, and racial and cultural identity that the film avoids. Instead, Tailfeathers and Hepburn give us a grounded interrogation of these topics. Their script, along with Norm Li’s cinematography, focuses on the presence of violence as a pervasive aspect of female experience. Tensions arise from day-to-day dilemmas, such as the decision Rosie faces about whether to maintain the fraught stability of partnership, and to continue living with her partner’s mother, versus striking off on her own and facing as-yet unknown difficulties. With refreshing subtlety, Tailfeathers and Hepburn manage to show and not tell trauma. Their nuanced approach is particularly felt in the film’s andante pacing – The Body Remembers is slow. Much of the story is told in real time with scenes and shots alternating between Áila’s and Rosie’s perspectives. As viewers, the stripped-down narrative of The Body Remembers encourages us to feel close to both women, but the absence of a melodramatic arc prevents us from assuming we can fully understand them. In lieu of a smooth catharsis, we are compelled to note the ways in which individuals may protect themselves through shielding secrets and intimacies.
Taken as a whole, The Body Remembers is a thoughtful illustration of the complex ways in which trauma can educate, undermine, and fortify an individual’s sense of self and her knowledge about the world. In a scene that comes late in the film, Áila halfway convinces Rosie to go to a safe house and the characters ride there together in a cab. At first the atmosphere in the car is tense. Rosie is clearly unsure of the short- and long-term advantages of staying in a shelter. The characters’ hitherto smooth rapport becomes uneasy as Áila shifts from empathetic first-responder to assertively – though never aggressively – suggesting ways for Rosie to alter her circumstances. The viewer is placed in the uncomfortable position of pseudo-arbiter: we observe Rosie’s desire to be independent alongside her difficult position, as well as Áila’s own vulnerability, a force which underlies her desire to support Rosie. Without knowing the entirety of either woman’s situation, judgment seems impossible: throughout the film, would-be assessments about the characters’ decisions flip self-reflexively onto the viewer. Who are we to assess the righteousness of Áila’s advice, or what course of action would best serve Rosie? What is the relationship between receiving support and consenting to it? Rosie never asks Áila for help, at least not verbally, and in a few scenes she wryly queries Áila’s impulse to assist her. In the cab, Rosie somewhat cheekily convinces the driver that she and Áila are sisters and that Áila is en route to alcohol addiction treatment. The cabbie’s fumbling kindliness, including admission of his own addiction struggles, furthers the loose promise of connections between strangers initially presented by Rosie and Áila’s encounter. At the same time, the unlikeliness of these interchanges leading to any sort of systemic change underscores the unstable social realities impacting all the characters’ lives. While the women are paying customers, the driver displays compassion, but would he even notice them, let alone their challenges, outside of a transaction? While Rosie’s sense of humour in this scene has a kind of optimistic potential in that it leads to a sharing of issues, it also serves as a reminder that identifying intersections between social issues doesn’t necessarily bring us any closer to solving the underlying problems.
When watching The Body Remembers, we are constantly reminded of our limited understanding of the characters. That the women’s backgrounds are relatable, yet widely different – Áila is Blackfoot from the Kainai First Nation (Blood Reserve) in Canada and Sámi from northern Norway, whereas Rosie is Kwakwaka’wakw from British Columbia, Canada – reiterates the difficulty of mapping one experience or perspective onto another. Beyond differences in heritage, Áila and Rosie also occupy disparate class positions: Áila keeps a small, chic apartment, whereas Rosie stays with her boyfriend’s mother in a seemingly less upscale part of Vancouver. We only see the characters for part of a single day, and the script lacks voiceover or other extra-expositional devices. Perhaps this psychic distance is what makes the camera’s intimate physical proximity so affecting. An early scene in a doctor’s office, where Áila changes out of her clothes in preparation for an IUD insertion, is echoed when the camera tracks Rosie as she tugs off a rain-drenched tie-dye sweatshirt and changes into borrowed clothes in Áila’s bathroom. This borderline voyeurism recalls the ambiguous lines between caregiving, advocacy, charity, and presumption. An additional layer of complexity is added to the protagonists’ dynamic through their different relationships to motherhood: whereas Rosie seems relatively calm about her pregnancy, Áila has a more uncertain position on maternity and mentions at one point that her partner may be more interested in parenting than she presently is.
The Body Remembers is aware of its limits, and this lends a directness to its storytelling. The production is sparse and tactfully avoids fanciful flashback sequences or camera flourishes. I also noted an apt absence of sentimentality about landscape. (Canadian television and film projects about Indigenous characters or topics helmed by non-Indigenous makers seem often to use scenic establishing shots as shorthand for establishing identity and place.) Instead, the film is set in a close and highly contained urban, human sphere. Shots roil with intensity, beckoning the viewer in. There are no moralizing shortcuts or incentives for passing premature judgment. By thoughtfully abstaining from manufactured catharsis or generalisations about womanly bonds or trauma, The Body Remembers centres the vast challenges inherent to interpersonal recognition and support. Read in this light, the film’s andante rhythms make all the more sense. Tailfeathers and Hepburn disavow spectacle to offer humane glimpses, chronicling the insidious presence of trauma.
