Blending Identities

This week I watched a documentary called Elena (available on Netflix), by a young Brazilian filmmaker, Petra Costa, where she remembers her older sister Elena, and explores the trauma and grief of losing her when Petra was only 7.

Elena left her home in Brazil to pursue acting in NYC in the 80's, since her options in Brazil were limited. Despite being very talented, this turned out to be much more difficult than she expected, and so began a downward spiral of depression, which the film handles in a tactful but compelling way. It makes use of home videos that Petra and others in the family took over the years, and incredibly intimate audio tape recordings that Elena mailed home, journaling her struggles in heartfelt, poetic fashion, as she wandered through the city hopelessly in search of acting roles out of a sincere need for artistic expression, which goes unmet much to her anguish.

There are moments in the film that seemed impossible to capture, like when Elena talks about meeting Francis Ford Coppola at a function (which we see on tape!), and Coppola suggests she should try out for a part in The Godfather III. Throughout all of this, Petra narrates the film as though she's addressing Elena, telling her the story of what happened and how she (Petra) was experiencing it as a child.

What's striking is that the two sisters' voices are so similar, that at times we're not sure if we're hearing Elena's tape recordings, or Petra's narration of the film. And then later, she begins including their mother in the film, who also struggled with depression, and also sounds a lot like the two sisters, and then the three voices begin to overlap, and their images begin to mesh together in the abstract, experimental form that Petra has chosen to shoot and edit this film.

It's a fascinating way that the filmmaker has found to reveal the way that mental illness has a hereditary aspect, and how the closeness of family, especially mothers and sisters, creates such a powerful influencing effect on each others' psyche and identity. This is a family so passionate about art that in the absence of it they literally perish, and there's a sense that Petra could not help but capture the memory of her sister on film as a form of catharsis.