This powerful documentary is definitely one to watch...
Directors: Rebecca Lloyd-Evans and Lisa Selby
Running time: 92 minutes
Blue Bag Life is a documentary-drama composed of free-form footage, diary entries and unflinchingly personal interviews. Over the span of ninety minutes, the film seeks to uncover the melancholia of motherhood and the impact of addiction within the family unit.
Directors Lisa Selby and Rebecca Hirsch Lloyd-Evans never once compose this cinematic experience in a way that aims to glorify or repackage drug-use as an aesthetically-introspective medium, nor does the documentary ever act as a condemnation against the complex confines of addiction. Rather, it provides a blunt, ‘social realist’ approach to documentary-making - plainly presenting (opposed to hyper-aestheticising) how Lisa Selby’s mother's (Helen) and boyfriend's (Elliot) overlapping battles with addiction have constrained her own relationship to affection, addiction and emotional nourishment.
The opening segment. Helen. Sat in the cigarette-haze of an unkept, damp, hoarder's home. Casually contemplating on her abandonment of infant daughter Lisa in order to follow the path of alcoholism and drug dependency.
‘I’m not a very good Mother, am I? I do the best I can, but I’m simply hopeless.’
‘Disconnection is the only motherhood I’ve ever known.’
Selby accentuates a raw emotional sincerity throughout by highlighting the impossible task of the adult woman attempting to assuage and grow into her own image of femininity while simultaneously mitigating the terrible internal torture of being permanently severed from every daughter's most crucial exemplar of femininity: her own mother.
The persistence to honouring vulnerability isn’t all entirely bleak, however. As the documentary progresses, the fertility process between Selby and Elliot becomes a sweet incentive for both to provide a child with a life, completely opposing the ones they were forced up on. The decision process subtly and beautifully showcases the flux between the fear and feverishness all women face when considering motherhood. Selby focuses a lot on her father in this segment, repeatedly referring to him as ‘both a mother and a father’. But, as we can see through Selby’s unwavering need to connect to her mother, love derived from men can rarely act as a substitute for the absence of motherly love.
Raw and honest, Blue Bag Life resembles an insightful, reflective piece of art, as opposed to an easily digestible piece of media that has the ability to be consumed offhandedly
The documentary itself is constructed from footage that spans over numerous years of Lisa Selby’s life. And there is a recurring sense that all of Selby’s achievements are juxtaposed by an inadequate support system and almost diminished by the emotional turbulence of those around her. Everything she accomplishes is of her own accord - unable to rely on a sustained sense of support and comfort from anyone other than herself. So, as Selby finds herself in Hong Kong, working and wandering around the neon city, the misery of motherhood still shrouds the joy she could be experiencing.
The shots of sunsets fading into dusk, the prolonged train views, the mountains, and large, empty swimming pools are all suffused with a sense of misery. And it is this pervasive, intangible aesthetic emptiness that adorns this depressive subject matter with such beauty.
Selby’s estrangement from everything - herself, her femininity, her mother within the Hong Kong sequence - keeps drawing me back to Sylvia Plath’s famous quote that crystalizes the fractured feminine: ‘I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.’ With all of Lisa’s important interpersonal relationships strained by addiction and disconnect, her life seems to be constantly circling around this notion. With no one to talk to, the absence of the maternal is at the centre of all her suffering. This documentary is particularly refreshing in its honesty; devoid of denial, Selby offers a completely open look into the the effects of an inadequate maternal figure on the adult woman.
Directors Lisa Selby and Rebecca Hirsch Lloyd-Evans' diary-footage documentary unearths the guilt, shame and inconsistencies of unorthodox motherhood. Raw and honest, Blue Bag Life resembles an insightful, reflective piece of art, as opposed to an easily digestible piece of media that has the ability to be consumed offhandedly - and it's one of the most passively impactful documentaries of the year.
Blue Bag Life is coming to cinemas from Friday 7 April
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