The Matryoshka Moment: 3 Films in 2024
Editor-in-Chief Hannah Jade reflects on 3 films that were integral to her year.
Courtesy of Pinterest.
My family and I moved thrice this year. Amid the chaos of packing, I found a matryoshka doll I received as a gift when I was in kindergarten. You had to twist and pull her body apart to get the smaller bodies out. Whenever that happened, a loud “pop” would bounce off the walls. And as she got older, the wood she was made out of began to splinter. She was rosy-faced with blue eyes and blond hair, and her red lips were always pressed shut, like she wanted to say something but held back. Her body was bulbous, bearing the shape of a lightbulb sawed in half and conjoined with the bottom of a plastic jar. I had to hold her in both hands or risk dropping and breaking her. In the set, the smallest doll is the one which had the fewest details and a smudged mouth, like she couldn’t speak even if she really wanted to. I actually lost that piece long ago when I decided to show my neighbours the set. She rolled down the granite slope at the carpark and plopped into the longkang. I never saw that piece again.
Sometimes I cradled her in my chest and pretended to make my Baby Alive jealous. The matryoshka was too big to carry around with me when I went out to play. I kept her beside my lamp and Bible in my room, the three always aligned in a perfect triangle. Such was girlhood. Sometimes I lined the dolls up by my window just to see the sunlight scatter across the hand-painted blue and orange details that adorned her. Other times, my sister and I used her as makeshift bowling pins when we played in our living room at home. I had secretly wished to be as simple as the matryoshka. She had such a steady order to her life and there were never any questions of what-if’s, no fear and no trouble. She was as is, and as she would always be.
The matryoshka set was one of my first entry points into exploring my identity. Now, in my early twenties, I look back fondly at my childhood and adolescence for their better parts. As this year comes to a close, I realise that there are still so many things I’ve yet to figure out. How I wish it could be as easy as opening a set of dolls, lining them up, and calling it a day.
It has been a tumultuous year of celebrating the body by prioritising self-respect and healing old wounds. Here are three films that guided me on distinct trails to uncover the above. These films represent our inner dolls of rage, redemption and rekindling in several forms. Although not all were released this year, their respective messages remain timeless in encouraging our self-exploration of identity and body.
The Substance (2024)— A bargain with smallness
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) tells a tale as old as time: Women are worthless if they do not fit into the parameters determined by the male gaze; their sole purpose, whether in life or death, is to satiate the patriarchy although it will never be enough. In the film, the male director, who puppeteers Elisabeth’s and Sue’s respective careers, points to a more elusive but prevalent evil: the female protagonists’ internalised misogyny. He strategically pawns them off in various commercial tactics in his entertainment fantasyland and represents piggish evils like capitalist greed and sexual objectification of the female body. At first watch, the rebuttals of the protagonists’ internalised misogyny reveals their attempts to reclaim their agency as women, despite being at war with each other. Beyond this, however, we are stirred to interrogate our treatment of our own internalised misogyny, the forgotten substance which exists within our subconscious.
In my favourite scene, MonstroElisaSue’s bloody expulsions transgress the socially acceptable boundaries of physical contact. She crumbles into blood and bone as she spins around on stage, drenching the audience, including the male director, with her blood. In her massacre, they are prevented from seeing their own skin or opening their eyes. The tactile and visual deprivation the audience is subjected to is a smidgen of Elisabeth’s own failure to live life on her own terms without resenting Sue. Bathing the audience with blood reaffirms MonstroElisaSue in her attempt to reclaim herself as “one”, albeit short-lived. The physical exchange of substances, from one skin to another, is anxiety-inducing. Due to the sheer amount of blood wilfully expelling from MonstroElisaSue’s body, you can almost smell and/or taste the rotting, coppery liquid, even though it is not physically present. Its pungent stench alone brings about an anxiety that danger is present. Her fleeing flesh and gurgled screams indicate signs of her inner struggle to vocally reclaim her dignity among the human audience, but ironically reveal an inner need to free herself from the prison of her internalised misogyny. Perhaps Coralie Fargeat is trying to show us how demonic and rotten our insides become when we persistently try to fit ourselves into an invisible compulsory feminine and female mould dictated by the patriarchy. And perhaps that is what “The Substance” really is.
Despite its simple storyline, The Substance, relegated me to a place of helplessness. Many fans expressed how powerful they felt at the end of the film. While I agree to a certain degree, I could not shake off the realisation that the gory violence enacted by MonstroElisaSue merely covered up the fact that she experienced a stinging loss of power. Although dramatic, that described the everyday for many other vulnerable people trapped between a rock and a hard place. It was this reflection that made me feel very miniscule within myself that night. I felt like the tiniest matryoshka doll in my set.
Amelie (2001) — Worlds within worlds
We used to joke that the matryoshka dolls would climb out of the encompassing doll late at night and tinker around the house. I believed that each of them had a mind of its own, and that each was capable of feeling their own versions of joy, anger, and fear. Our filmic experiences mirror this too —watching a film is like entering a world within a world.
In its unique world of structure and spontaneity, Amelie (2001) contains several vignettes of the titular character’s life and her relationships with different people.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie is a film about deriving pleasure from being present in the moment and enjoying the process of “doing something”. It’s a film that reminds us that everything arrives in good time, and that things depart from our lives when they have to. It is not possible to plan life to a T, yet Amelie displays a need to always anticipate what’s next. To make her neighbours, colleagues and friends feel like their lives are serendipitous, Amelie orchestrates well thought-out plans to embody the illusion that “good things just happen” to them.
Each character is introduced to us with an accompanying narration of their quirks and flaws. As Amelie matchmakes the various supporting characters together (e.g. Georgette and Joseph) and unites sentimental goods with others (e.g. Dominique’s reunion with a tin of childhood knick-knacks), the audience is introduced to Amelie’s determination and resourcefulness through her meticulously planned quests to accomplish these feats.
Her attention to detail results in amusing quests like the carnival hunt she orchestrated for Nino to be reunited with his beloved photo album. For us, these quests may provide entertainment value because of how unexpected they are. These structured quests, which benefit the other characters, are necessary for Amelie to live a fulfilled life. Amelie presents a view of the world of someone who intentionally embodies the role of caregiving without condition—meaning that the beneficiaries of their care tend to overlook their emotional and/or physical labour.
When it comes to her private life, however, Amelie displays great apprehension to be taken on a serendipitous quest of her own. It is the not-knowing that is scary, yet she gives into it all the same.
Amelie lets her guard down as she eventually allows Nino into her life. She invites him into her flat, where she has crafted dreams of love in diverse forms (e.g. creating a frankenstein love letter written in the voice of her neighbour’s late cheating husband, for her neighbour). Yet, none of these fantasies were meant for her entirely. She was merely a conductor for her loved ones to connect with new and past loves.
When Nino appears at Amelie’s door after a long game of cat-and-mouse, it feels like tangled webs of the same string have finally been unravelled and laid out in a perfect line. Amelie invites him in and Nino obliges. In the scene, my mind dreams up the silent dialogue between them: You’re here. Yes, I am. I can’t believe you’re here. I’m here. I don’t know what to say. It’s okay, let’s not say anything. There is nothing left, nothing more to say.
In this scene, the characters resign themselves to expressing themselves through silent physicality. Without saying too much, the scene involves Amelie gently kissing Nino’s eyelid, a gesture which indicates her apprehension to transgress the bounds of their acquaintanceship. Although their relationship was never really coded as such, it is the potential of what they could become that drives the tension of the scene. The kiss also becomes a precious moment in Amelie’s life, in which she seems to embody the advice given by her painter neighbour, who subtly tells her that risks have to be taken in order to have truly lived.
Paris Is Burning (1990) — Havens and Hope
On the Transgender Day of Remembrance (November 20) this year, a friend and I attended The Projector’s screening of Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990). The cinema was packed and many people were bursting with excitement, catching up with old friends and acquaintances. Amid the exuberance, it felt like a massive “coming home” of our local queer community. We were family, even if just for a few hours.
When Venus Xtravanganza is murdered, the film does not show any archival documents about her death (no newspapers, no radio chatter, no memorial service). Instead, we see her green bangles clatter noisily on her arms and her bright yellow hair and beaming smile as she smokes her cigarette and bops to a rhythm in her head. The cinema is very quiet even though the following scene—a thumping beat, sequined costumes, a boisterous speaker and voguing—seems to lurch from the screen. Later, I learnt that many tragedies struck in the process of making the film and even after it was wrapped. Most of the people who were a part of its production are dead.
I think placing this iconic film in this article puts it out of place, but I wanted an opportunity to acknowledge it in Exposure at least once. It is rare that we get to watch films which touch us beyond the surface-level emotional periphery we bring when we enter a cinema. Paris Is Burning does that by presenting itself as a memoir writing the memory of queerness. The film captures drag mothers and their children donning the most innovative costumes. Some are hand-sewn, some are purchased, and others are possibly looted. In the ballroom, they come alive in an endless tapestry of colour, bedazzle, and attitude. During scenes like this, New York’s layers as a city of hustle, corporate culture, and heteronormativity are peeled apart like an onion, revealing its belly of pride and joy. Let them throw shade.
Where there’s a ballroom, there’s community. I find the term “community” particularly perplexing because of how layered it is. It is a term that has also been adopted into many individual vocabularies and thus holds different degrees of significance for everyone. In Michelle Parkerson’s essay about the film, published in Current by The Criterion Collection, she writes about the presence of self-hatred in the drag community.
“When I grew up, you wanted to look like Marlene Dietrich or Betty Grable . . . Nobody wanted to look like Lena Horne.”
True to life, hatred manifests stubbornly in the documentary in several ways. For instance, many of the ballroom attendees and conveners faced varying degrees of abuse and abandonment in their families. As such, it is impossible to make a full and fair evaluation of the film without including worldly horrors such as poverty, racism, and structural oppression, among many others. More pertinently, however, the film captures a collective resistance against compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity. For one, the blossoming of chosen families, Houses LaBeija and Ninja, represents a safe haven for transgender, transsexual, queer, and gay youths. These families shelter those who are in need of a home and most house mothers encourage their “children” to seek work to support themselves. For the mainstream heteronormative eye, these homes remain baffling for their distinct lack of a “father” and a “mother”.
In a section of Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970), she posits that the younger generation reaps the rewards of their ancestors, without having lived through the same prejudice and trauma as them. We perhaps see a semblance of truth in this in how we have normalised historically queer lexicons on social media, in how pride has become whittled down into a source of profit for several corporations every June. While these privileges are enjoyable to some extent, we must not forget the atrocities endured by older generations and other queer folk who are still fighting for basic human rights.
Paris Is Burning reminded me that life does not have to exist in a square. You can be anything you want regardless of what the world tells you. Upon leaving the theatre, these words stuck with me: There is still time and space to carve a mark, your mark, in this world, even if it is adorning a plastic-bag-looking gown with sparkling makeup, and balancing on your tip-toes on a step ladder in front of a massive fan in an underground basement, and pretending you’re splashed across Vogue’s cover page. It is a reminder that life is not sterile or structured like the matryoshka doll; it is messy and hurtful and yet it is your oyster no matter the wounds you sustain, no matter the times you lash out, no matter the people you fall in love with, and no matter the times you run away from your birth home. Your time is now.