Painful — and Sometimes Sweet — Moments of Existence
A review of the film Because We Are Too Many, directed by Eve Natasha Leonard-Walsh
One of the most important features of independent filmmaking is that the director, for various reasons such as the film’s budget, the use of digital technology, and working with small crews, can undertake experiments that are impossible within large, high-budget productions. Although independent cinema cannot compete with Hollywood in terms of audience numbers, and lacks the capacity for wide distribution or the consistent ability to recoup its budget, the overall progress of cinema is in fact driven by experiments and trials that independent filmmakers carry out. In such films, creative control remains with the director, allowing them to focus on the artistic dimensions of their work without adhering to the written and unwritten rules of the mainstream. What Eve Natasha Leonard-Walsh achieves in Because We Are Too Many is the precise example of independent filmmaking: a brilliant work and a distinctive voice from an artist who, through intelligent and creative use of the tools at her service, achieves a highly commendable result.
Because We Are Too Many opens with hazy, dreamlike images that evoke a kind of flashback, a dream, a form of non-realistic scene — a recollection of the past, or a nightmare. With a temporal jump to the present, the year 2020, and the monologue we hear, we realize the film intends to work with the question of temporal back-and-forth. The film begins with the everyday: the life of a woman and her son in a small house, in a year that remains in our collective memory as the year of COVID, of death and mortality, of distances and restrictions. The film appears to be about these very distances — the distance between a person and themselves, between them and their past, between them and the other members of a society, and the distance between them and more abstract notions such as happiness. The choice of that particular time period therefore carries a profound semantic connection to the concepts the film as a whole brings forward.
In those early scenes we become familiar with the situation, the place, and the main characters, and through the brief cuts we see of the mother and child’s life, we sense their solitude. The risk the filmmaker takes is to show us this passage of moments through various cuts and fleeting instants right at the beginning of the film, so that we ask ourselves: in a feature that runs for an hour and a half, what does the director intend to do with the rest of the journey? This portrayal of everyday routine is interrupted by a dramatic slice of reality: the mother and child visit the Jobcentre Plus, where we discover that in addition to loneliness, COVID, and the painful monotony of life, other problems are at work — among them a father of whom they have no news, and serious financial difficulties, in a society where other people are also struggling with economic hardship.
The filmmaker constructs this world intelligently and with subtlety, step by step. This is the mother’s world — a woman played by the director herself — surrounded by the stormy crises of her life, and this forms an important starting point for a film that is going to address familiar human concepts such as struggle and solitude. From the outset, the film lays out and clarifies the grounds it will use. It shows us that it intends to deal with suffering, with the painful bitterness of living with poverty and frustration. From the details we see in the film we can understand that the mother’s world stands even in opposition to its environment; recall the brief moment when the mother and child are walking along the pavement and the mother snaps at a passer-by, “What are you looking at?” Having an autistic son seems to have placed her once more in a sensitive position — the moment in the park when she watches another child’s reaction to her own son.
The film advances a very important and sensitive subject alongside its main path: autistic children. The significant points the film recalls without heavy emphasis, through subtle and indirect suggestions, are among its great achievements: the kind of society in which autistic children are forced to live at home. Given that COVID itself is a factor keeping people indoors, we are reminded that society is neither aware of nor prepared to encounter autistic children. Repetitive movements for sensory regulation (commonly called stimming) and avoidance of eye contact are often misinterpreted as “rudeness” or “defiance,” and this obstructs effective connection between autistic children and society, directing them instead towards a safer environment — the home. The film beautifully shows us that there is no difference between autistic children and other children except in sensory processing — which is by no means a reason for isolation and loneliness, but on the contrary can make them intensely creative and intensely kind.
The narrative points its finger to an important issue that has existed since human beings first began creating works of art and that still seems to persist: judgment. In every interaction the mother and child have with the outside world, and even in the moments when the outside world enters their home (including the person who comes from the Community Nurse Support Team), we witness the mother and child being judged — by a look, by a sentence, by a behavior, by a gesture — and this judgment can become yet another heavy burden on top of the other ones. It is worth noting that the film’s realism is so unexaggerated and so aligned with realist cinema that we do not feel the accumulation of all these bitter elements distances it from reality; on the contrary, we deeply understand how, in difficult situations, everything can combine to plunge a person into painful suffering. The film neither fully approaches so-called Extreme Realism nor entirely distances itself from realism; rather, it strives to maintain a degree of dramatic inclination, showing tense moments (including that nervous tension at the Jobcentre Plus) while not setting aside moments of joy and profound human feeling. Between these two poles a satisfactory balance is established. Thus it contains fleeting painful moments — such as when the narrator’s voice tells us that her five-year-old child does not call her “Mummy” because he cannot yet speak — and also moments of life’s beauty, however equally fleeting, that can be found within it.
Part of the mother’s world is constructed in relation to her five-year-old son; that is, an important part of the film depends on this relationship, on the sufferings and joys of this beautiful maternal love. Another part of the mother’s world is constructed in relation to the surrounding world — with those who judge, with the environment (of which COVID is also a part), and with the people she encounters in daily life. Another dimension of the mother’s relationships, equal in importance to the others, is constructed with her own past: the gaze turned inward, the return to the self, to childhood. Therefore, when we return to 1992 we are in fact probing the present. Understanding the past is as important as understanding the mother’s present-day relationship with her son.
When we return to the past — directed with skill and complete believability — we are once again at the center of a house. A cramped, stifling, dimly lit flat that is made even more oppressive by cold colors, and within this flat (which seems a twin of the flat we see years later in 2020) small lives are being lost, being wasted, while everyday routine, like a terrifying monster, slowly devours them. Here the mother is a little girl, vulnerable and beautiful, who suffers both at school and at home, and who seems to find a measure of calm only in nature. Having irresponsible parents who are drunk all day, and teachers who appear entirely incapable of understanding her and who have nothing but procedures and rules, places ever greater pressure on this innocent child. It is in such an atmosphere that the tunnel in the forest carries a concrete significance in the character’s life. The moments of the child’s solitude in the playground, the forest, and the house are depicted with impact, and the dangers, fears, and terrors that could have harmed her at any of those lonely moments linger, yet it is the tunnel that leaves a lasting impression on the viewer’s mind. Some sequences in this film are done so skillfully and at the same time so freshly that they will remain in the viewer’s memory — among them the night when the mother and her two children go to church and one of the children opens her drawing book on the church floor and begins to draw. Another allusion to the painful solitude of children, this time within a warm place that offers a measure of comfort.
Past and present are not merely two simple times in Because We Are Too Many; rather, through these two times — which seem not to follow one after the other but to run parallel — we are given the opportunity to compare: the comparison between the present-day mother and her own mother in the past, between the child of today and the child of yesterday, between yesterday’s house and today’s house, and more generally between two worlds, two kinds of solitude, two kinds of injury, two ways of confronting the world, two forms of isolation. The director brilliantly draws us, through these comparisons and through the construction of the central character’s world in relation to the other characters of past and present, into the depths of her life — a very difficult task, especially in a feature film where maintaining equilibrium among the various narrative aspects and sustaining tone and rhythm is far from easy.
In this respect the director performs well. Not only does she maintain the rhythm of her film from beginning to end, but with measured and appropriate control of tone she avoids falling into the trap of a purely mournful film and demonstrates that her relationship with reality matters more to her than constructing a black world without any sign of escape. Because We Are Too Many is truly engaging; without pretension, it shares with us some of the most important human issues of our time, without wishing to over-emphasize them and without intending to deliver a moral lesson. It is a film full of touching human moments — profoundly painful yet honest and humane — that approaches the viewer with intelligence, and one can guess that it will remain in the mind of its audience.
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