(Latvia/USA, 88 min.)
Written and directed by Signe Baumane
Starring: Signe Baumane
It helps to be a little bit crazy. Filmmaker Signe Baumane
gives an eccentric and insightful portrait of madness in the unconventionally
personal film Rocks in My Pockets. Rocks, which screens at Ottawa European Union Film Festival on November 28, is a truly unique bit of personal history
as Baumane chronicles her family’s history of mental illness. This animated
tale, Latvia’s official submission for Best Foreign Language Film in this
year’s Academy Awards race, is a wry, funny, and insightful stroke of genius.
Rocks in My Pockets moves at a zany pace as Baumane narrates the stories of five women as she traces her family’s history of depression and mental illness back to her own peculiar brainwaves. Taking an ironic, self-deprecating tone, Baumane reflects humorously and matter-of-factly on the lives of her ancestors and she speculates on the pressures that she believes may have driven them to early deaths. Her sarcastically singsong narration examines the scope of her family’s history of depression within Latvia’s greater thread of madness: Is she crazy or is the world itself just friggin’ nuts?
“In this crazy world,
how do you stay sane?” she asks wondering why her grandmother might have tried
to drown herself in the waters to which she trudged every day down a steep hill
to gather forty—yes, forty—buckets of water to for her cows. Granny Baumane,
however, failed to pull a Virginia Woolf whilst trying to drown herself and the
funny narrator says that there were no rockets in her pockets to sink. However,
as Baumane elaborates, enough was weighing her down.
The roots of Baumane’s family tree arguably form the
strongest chapter of the film—and also the fullest—as Baumane narrates the
story of her strong-willed grandmother who worked tirelessly until she either
dropped dead from a weak heart or offed herself. (It depends on which of her
eight children you ask.) The breathless narration points out the social
circumstances that contribute to and compound mental illness as he imagines the
isolation that he grandmother must have faced raising eight children alone
while tending to cows, horses, and a husband under the state-sanctioned
poverty of Soviet socialism.
Baumane takes a pointedly feminist look at depression,
noting how the courses of these five women’s lives were largely shaped by
gendered standards and circumstances, like the pressures of running a full
household with a dead-beat husband or of putting on a charade of marriage to
please friends and family. The black humour of Baumane’s delivery—the quirky
animation and storybook satire—isn’t afraid to interpret or critique what might
have been going on in the (allegedly) wonky minds of her relations. One
especially funny and effective scene sees her grandmother tend to the horny
rabbits that she keeps at the farm to feed and clothe her family. She’s
startled by how calmly and placidly these cute little bunnies eat their young,
but Baumane also weighs a sense of envy as her grandmother looks at the freedom
of escaping the burden of motherhood, but she also balances the effort with the
rewards and joys of having children.
How one stabilizes
these factors while also pursuing one’s own hopes and dreams is the real pit of
madness, Baumane suggests, as the tragic stories end in poverty, sadness, divorce,
and death. Bauman’s own creation of the film seems to be the best solution,
since embracing the currents of madness that ripple through one’s brain and
harnessing their creative force offers an empowering way to take control of the
disease. (After all, some of history’s best artists, including the likes of
Virginia Woolf, have their own history of mental illness.)
Conventional discussions on mental illness don’t really do
the subject justice, but Rocks in My
Pockets’ offbeat animation lets
viewers appreciate what Baumane and the women in her family experience by
creating a strange and subjective odyssey in which one feels the anxiety and
depression of the characters through the striking images. The unusually varied
colour palette is bright, yet depressed, taking the fantastical world of the
Latvian countryside a shade muter to mirror the washed out feelings of the five
women.
Baumane’s madcap
narration—there’s barely a second in the film without her hilarious voice
over—creates an element of sensory overload as one’s brain absorbs all this
information while taking in the unusual shapes and figures of her imaginative
landscape. The sensory overload is clever, though, since Rocks in My Pockets forces one’s brain to work at every minute and
suss out the funny obstacles one must overcome to receive proper treatment for
depression and, more gravely, to make one’s friends and family recognize
depression when they see it. “The road to sanity is a wild ride,” Baumane says
and Rocks in My Pockets is as crazy
as crazy can be.
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Rocks in My Pockets screens at the European Union Film Festival on
Friday, Nov. 28 at 9:15 pm at Library and Archives Canada, 395 Wellington St.
Please note that
director Signe Baumane will attend the screening.
The European Union
Film Festival runs Nov. 13-30.
Please visit www.cfi-icf.ca for more information on this
year’s festival.
More coverage of the European Union Film Festival may be found here.
More coverage of the European Union Film Festival may be found here.