Deaf review – a young mother’s struggles to be heard | Film
FAr de l’Arbre, the brilliant fictional book by Andrew Solomon on different parental children, offers the useful distinction between vertical and horizontal identities. Vertical identities are inherited – a surname, ethnicity or nationality; Horizontal identities are qualities that define us with which parents can have nothing to do with, like the kinship that autistic people feel with each other, or be homosexual or deaf.
Deaf, a Spanish language film directed by Eva Libertad which features the deaf sister of Libertad, Miriam Garlo, offers an almost perfect fictitious illustration of the tension between vertical and horizontal identities within a newly struck nuclear family. The Angela Professional Potter (Garlo) is deaf and married to Farmer Hector, a man hearing, and both communicate by sign language. Almost as soon as they discover that Angela is pregnant, small cracks appear in the foundations of their happiness. Angela’s deaf friends all sign their ecstatic joy and talk about their own pregnancy and birth difficulties with heat. But a few minutes before Angela reveals that she is with Child, the mother hearing from Angela (Elena Irureta) mentions with casualness that she thinks that things are better for the young couple without children, indicating that she believes that deafness is too affliction. Talk about clumsy.
The film jumps easily, covering months then years at the same time. After a difficult birth, Angela is clearly depressed and challenged by mothering, and has trouble producing enough milk for the ONA little girl (played by a half-dozen couts with various ages). In addition, just after the birth of ONA, it is not conclusive that the baby is deaf. When they finally discover that she can hear well, it is as if a curtain descended between her and Angela.
Hector, who appears as a pretty support partner and dad, quietly occupies more parental tasks, but with Angela’s dismay, he does not always remember to sign during communication with Ona, thus unconsciously relegating sign language to secondary status and thus excluding Angela. These slight or misunderstandings roll, growing up like snowballs, until the couple barely communicates with each other.
At a crucial moment, and the one where a spectator could start to think that Angela is a little too delicate about the micro-aggressions perceived around her, Libertad refuses sound so that we suddenly hear the world of the way in which his protagonist experiences it. It is a sound landscape stifled alternately but strangely peaceful, then strident and creaks when Angela tries to wear the hearing aids that she hates. The film becomes an illustration of the way cinema can be an engine for empathy, and viewers will certainly not need to be deaf to get what Angela is going through. It is a moving exploration of the difficulties of new maternity, a moment full of anxiety and pain as much as joy for some people. The performances are beautifully nuanced throughout.
