How tragedy and trauma turn into cinema

When I first heard of Jennifer Fox’s The Tale, I was shocked. It took me a couple of minutes, and some reassuring thoughts, to come back to the present. How can filmmakers confront their demons through the medium of cinema? This isn’t a glaring phenomenon in literature because it keeps happening there all the time.

Authors pour their hearts out on pages, and, their blood and sweat carry beads of inspiration wherever they go. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is probably the greatest example in this regard. She wrote a heart-wrenching novel about a woman grappling with the fissures of mental illness and killed herself soon after the book’s publication. She wrote to her mother, about the book, as follows: “What I’ve done is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalising to add colour – it’s a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown.... I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.”

Plath isn’t the only novelist to take such a drastic step. John O’Brien, who wrote the 1990 semi-autobiographical novel Leaving Las Vegas, decided to put his miseries to an end by sacrificing his life to the mouth of a hungry bullet. The novel was adapted into a film, featuring Nicholas Cage and Elisabeth Shue, and went on to win several awards, one of which was the Academy Award for Best Actor. Thus, an actor played a somewhat fictionalised version of a writer and garnered praises upon praises while the original writer lay dead in the grave.

Writing a book and making a film are different ballgames. While the former is a very personal effort, filmmaking, on the other hand, involves collaboration. In that sense, revisiting trauma in a space designed and controlled by the heroes or the victims, however the writers like to see themselves as, seem much easier to cope with.

The Tale talks about the journey a documentary filmmaker, named Jennifer Fox (Laura Dern), takes to realise the abuse she suffered at the hands of her track coach (Bill, played by Jason Ritter). Fox, who is in her 40s now, begins to reexamine her relationship with her former coach after she receives a frantic call from her mother.

Her mother, upon going through the letters Fox wrote when she was thirteen years old, senses the viciousness with which Bill treated her young daughter.

Fox, perhaps, had always known that there was something wrong with a forty-year-old man “falling in love” and “making love” to a girl who was three times younger than his age. But she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. So, she let those memories simmer in the corner of her mind. Also, she didn’t want to be called a victim, and, hence, for a long time, she stayed away from revealing the obnoxious things she was made to do. Her decision to not share her story with anybody made it impossible for outsiders – including her own family members – to guide her.

In a stirring scene, she lashes out at her partner (Martin, played by Common) when he tells her that it’s “rape” and not a “relationship” when a forty-year-old adult “sleeps” with a thirteen-year-old teenager. She yells at him for reading her letters without her permission, and refuses to take the label of a victim.

Fox’s moment of epiphany arrives later, though. She asks one of her students, in the class she takes, to give some pointers regarding their first sexual encounter. The student, shyly and cautiously, tells that she was seventeen when she had sex for the first time. She continues, in the same breath, to add that her partner was also seventeen, and giggles while explaining how she had had a little orgasm during the act. Fox, however, had only thrown up at the end of her confused sexual experience with Bill.

The Tale is based on the letters writer-director Jennifer Fox wrote when she was 13. And this film puts the dark events, from those letters, on display. There isn’t a typical “happy ending” in this movie. For director Fox, nevertheless, the takeaway is different. In an interview with The Guardian, she stated: “Suffering is something you have to learn to figure out in your life; it’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Closer home, Kamal Haasan wrote Mahanadi, a gut-piercing Tamil drama about a father’s search for his children after fate hands him a bout of rough luck. In a column he penned for Hindustan Times last year, he said: “I have never spoken of what prompted me to write Mahanadi. Now my daughters are old enough to understand the ways of this world I can... I guess. My household help, all of them, conspired to kidnap my daughter for ransom. They even did a dry run. By accident I discovered their plan. I was angry, unnerved and ready to kill for my baby’s safety. But I saw sense in time. I was to write a new script and I kept delaying it for a month. Later when I sat down to write, the script wrote itself.... maybe assisted by my fear, apprehension and paranoia.”

I’m guessing it’s easier for folks who’ve had silver linings in their real-life stories. In Meet The Patels and The Big Sick (both autobiographical, in a way), the male protagonists Ravi Patel (Ravi Patel) and Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani) go through a gamut of emotions before marrying their white American girlfriends.

While Meet The Patels takes a documentary-style approach to narrate Patel’s crumbling psyche as he goes on to meet several women in the hope of getting hitched, The Big Sick is about Kumail tending to the needs of his sick ex-girlfriend in the hospital where she’s admitted for a lung infection.

Almost every filmmaker throws in their share of memories and experiences into the pots of stories they cook. And there seems to be no limit for the pieces of art they can extract from their own tragedies, or smiles, as I have learned from these absolutely brilliant movies.