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***½/**** starring Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden, Robert Taylor written and directed by Natalie Erika James
by Walter Chaw The bad guy in Natalie Erika James’s Saccharine is self-loathing. Self-loathing the ego-killer, the murderer of confidence, the enemy of joy. Saccharine completes a loose trilogy for James, with each entry to some extent exploring the monstrous mutation of self-hate under the tectonic effort required to repress it. It is a fog and the fire in which we burn. Relic detailed the guilt of a daughter who has lost sight of her dementia-ridden mother. Apartment 7A dealt with a young woman who has made socially unacceptable choices to achieve fame (recontextualizing Rosemary’s Baby, and Roman Polanski, in the process). Now Saccharine puts body image under the microscope. Her films are blueprints of the bans imposed on women by multiple, often conflicting (if uniformly brutal), cultural standards. Over three films, James has shown herself to be blunt but not didactic–a trick that’s harder to pull off than it seems. Hers is a voice for any person trapped in a liminal space between communities that would reject them. She’s a mixed-race person living in a predominantly white country (Australia). She’s a woman in a male-dominated industry who has, so far, only helmed projects centring women. With her third film, she’s taking on queer desire, the Asian diaspora, and what it feels like to be trapped in a body that doesn’t align with how you’ve been programmed to perceive yourself. The pain of dislocation in Relic, Apartment 7A, and Saccharine is crystalline and pure, aided by lead performances from Emily Mortimer, Julia Garner, and Midori Francis, respectively, that are naked, ugly, and raw. James is an artist. I feel seen by her work.
Hana (Francis) doesn’t like her body. She believes she’s too heavy, though I wonder if some of that contempt is sublimation of her ethnicity in a place where large numbers of the population will never think of her as one of their own. She’s a med student, by all evidence a good one, and one night she runs into an old pal, Melissa (Annie Shapero), who’s undergone a rather remarkable transformation. Her secret? Little pills called “Grey” that caused her pounds to “melt away.” Hana takes one, more as flirtation than conviction–I mean, a pretty girl offers you a pill like a challenge and you accept it, of course. It starts to work immediately, and Hana, a student on a budget, does a little chemistry to figure out what “Grey” is. It’s people. More specifically, it’s the ash of a dead person and, well, Hana happens to be taking Gross Anatomy I this semester, meaning she has a steady pipeline of dead flesh to incinerate if she wants it. The thing is, the way the pills work is that everything Hana eats feeds the ghost of the person she’s consuming instead. The question Saccharine asks is, what happens when the cadaver Hana’s group is dissecting had an eating disorder? What if Hana’s ghost is like a tapeworm? What if it’s voracious?
The corpse belongs to a woman named Grace (Octavia Barron Martin when alive, Anna Adams when not), whom the class dubs, unkindly, “Big Bertha.” In another context, “Big Bertha” was a WWI German siege howitzer quickly phased out of production due to faulty ammunition and the ease with which the Allies located and disabled it in battle. The term, however, lives on for its colourful alliteration. When Grace’s corpse is unveiled with the other cadavers, the professor instructs her students to respect the sacrifice of what are essentially their first patients as medical professionals–people who have given their bodies to the furtherance of their studies and, in that respect, done their part to save thousands of lives. Without knowing Grace, we sense she is kind and empathetic. We’ll later discover she had dear friends still grieving her. When we learn that her name is “Grace,” it is apparent what writer-director James thinks of her, too. There will be the facile, if understandable, interpretations of Saccharine as fatphobic rather than about fatphobia. I’d make the same distinction I made with, say, Get Out, which is not racist but rather about racism.
Hana starts “taking” regular doses of Grace and steadily loses weight, even as she binge-eats away her anxiety following every interaction with her nervous mother, Kimie (Showko Showfukutei). Some nights, she cleans out the pantry, not always aware that she’s doing it. While Saccharine obviously suggests a GLP-1 parable, if anything it’s about addiction in a general sense: not as a moral failing, but as a mental illness that has nothing to do with the value of the individual. In two months at the end of last year, I gained fifty pounds. I thought it was a moral failing. And I hated myself so much. It turned out to be congestive heart failure, the same ailment that took my dad when he was essentially my age. As my heart stopped working, it stopped being able to move fluid out of my body. I found myself to be vile. I didn’t see a doctor, because I equated my weight gain with a lack of self-discipline, a lack of self-control. I saw it as a moral failing. I heard my parents’ voices in my head, shaming me for my gluttony and stupidity. Eventually, I wound up in the hospital: I couldn’t breathe because my chest cavity had filled with fluid, and the doctors were amazed I hadn’t died. The first night I was there, nurses checked in every thirty minutes, I think to make sure they could still wake me. If my default reaction to weight gain hadn’t been disgust and shame, I feel certain I would have gotten help sooner. See, people who are obese don’t disgust me–unless they are me. It’s insidious hardwiring, and potentially fatal.
Hana has enrolled herself in one of those twelve-week body-sculpting programs. Health-club classes led by gamine lasses promising the imitation of their bodies, should one imitate their poses. Hana’s teacher is body-perfect Alanya (Madeleine Madden), who, although alarmed by Hana’s radical transformation, isn’t alarmed enough not to be suddenly attracted to Hana after weeks of not noticing her as anything but another sadsack client. They make love, and then Hana has one of her sleep-eating episodes, leaving Alanya’s kitchen a shambles. There are several frightening sequences in Saccharine where Grace’s ghost appears as a creak in the floor or a reflection in a convex surface. (One of the film’s cleverest tricks is to make bulging reflective surfaces, such as a spoon, how a hungry ghost becomes visible.) Yet the scariest scenes are those in which Hana is seen by others the way she sees herself. The greatest fear that people who hate themselves have is that everyone who is inexplicably in their lives will come to their senses. Hana’s best friend Josie (Danielle Macdonald) is at first happy for Hana for losing weight, then concerned, then injured as Hana lashes out at Josie’s worry, accusing her of jealousy. Hana, in the process of getting conventionally hotter, has grown inexpressibly uglier. The easy read of this is to say the picture is recklessly reactive; a better read is that members of the disfavoured–racial, sexual, whatever–dread being identified as alien. We spend so much of our lives wanting to fit in. We wear a lot of masks, hoping we can find one that allows us to pass.
A fascinating, terrifying highlight of James’s 2018 short Drum Wave finds children in masks performing at a Chinese party–a term I use to describe the kinds of parties my parents threw for their immigrant community. They are marked for me with horror because of the pressure to perform and the bragging over children. The open criticism of them, too, with weight a topic the Chinese of a certain generation seem uniquely comfortable remarking upon. I used to translate what my relatives said to me for my wife at gatherings. It was usually about how fat I was. Performance is central to James’s work–the piano, in particular. I was beaten severely for missing notes while practicing piano for competitions I participated in against my will. James’s award-winning music video for Life is Better Blonde‘s song “Mine” features the great Kentaro Hara on keyboards. Her video for the band’s “Follow Me” ups the stakes with a piano abandoned in an overgrown Russian forest for a Russian soldier, destroyed by PTSD, to discover and play. There is a piano moment in Relic; Apartment 7A‘s protagonist is a dancer often accompanied by piano; and the hero of Drum Wave is bullied into playing at the pleasure of the elders. The pressure to bring honour to your parents for your breeding in the arts is Victorian. Older. The pressure to succeed academically is an offshoot of that will towards class affectation. Hana’s unhappiness is a product of disapproval. So is her effectiveness as a student–her perfectionism and the attendant self-loathing whenever perfection proves impossible. I have taken over saying horrible things about me to myself for my parents, who are dead and gone. It’s the only inheritance they left me. Their ghosts are starving, and this is what I feed them.
The ending of James’s 2017 short Creswick reveals a dark passenger draped across the back of an aging father. His daughter can only see it once she’s reluctantly moved back into the family home with him. Hana’s dark passenger is Grace’s hunger, which is, after all, her own desire to be “pretty” and desired. In life, Grace sought solace in caring for others, channelling her pain into working with the disabled. She was so loved. Hana seeks affirmation from others as the foundation for her self-worth. Saccharine is about how people are defined not only by the society they’re raised in, but also by the societies of the people who raise them. When you’re the product of multiple societies, compounded by your other identities (queer, female, artist?), the possible iterations of dysfunction are multifoliate. Potentially infinite. “It’s not a bad thing for me to want to change myself for the better,” Hana protests. But we don’t spend enough time questioning the origins of our notions of good and evil. In the film’s most shocking sequence, Hana displays her lover’s prone body in the aspect of a painting glimpsed in the background of her school’s operating theatre. James is interested in both how visual media informs our notions of attractiveness and the people who are on the outside of that eternally. Hana sees her thin self in the mirror when she’s making out with Alanya for the first time, and James scores it like a panic attack. Her heat is instantly revulsion. When Alanya touches Hana’s stomach, Hana recoils and asks if they can turn off the light. This isn’t merely about weight: Saccharine is about all the ways we are taught to see ourselves, which is every way except, especially for vulnerable populations with outcast castes, with love and acceptance.
Like James’s previous films, Saccharine is unsettling mainly because it’s so personal. I doubt she’s capable of less. That she’s found success in the commercial realm speaks to how good she is at communicating the most hideous and private of secret shames in viscerally recognizable ways. Her work has indelible images, memorable gore effectively parcelled out, and an obsession with architecture that reminds a great deal of Roman Polanski. (The dive into the Polanski-verse of Apartment 7A was all but presaged by the hallway junctions of Relic.) The environments in these stories are like castles in Gothic literature: expressions of female sexual urges transmuted into haunted balustrades and flying buttresses and heroines in long white gowns, wandering, wandering. Consider the sequence where Hana interacts with her father in a cluttered living room, an old CRT television behind them mutely showing a 1950s domestic sitcom that mirrors the melodrama playing out in the foreground. Consider the library where Hana finally confides to her buddy Josie the terrible things she’s done and will do. Libraries are where learning happens, yes? Each new space in Saccharine marks the progression of the story and Hana’s actualization. It’s planned carefully, and yet its power is in everything unplanned. James has said this film is about her and her family (it’s dedicated to her late father), but I don’t know how that can be when it’s about me and mine. She’s held a glass up to me three times in a row. A convex, funhouse one, I see that–but now and then, those carnival mirrors are truer reflections of how we see ourselves, how we contort who we are into those obscene shapes, those malformed fabulations that are just mean caricatures of our emotional deformities. We draw those–and it’s harder to stop drawing them than you’d think. If you figure it out, please tell me how you did it.
