by Jane Reingold, MFT

Roman Salazar’s film, Sunday’s Illness, opens with a prolonged silence. Two bare-limbed trees stand strong, roots gnarled, deeply intertwined. The silence is punctured by the crackling sound of a woman’s — Chiara’s — boots walking over thick tree roots as she hikes. She stops at a rock formation, where she peers into the darkness, seeking. The scene then shifts to an opulent home, where an elegant older woman — Anabell — walks down a hallway, only the sound of her heels audible. She stumbles and quickly recovers, looking to see if anyone noticed. Everything is perfect and yet something trips her up. Like the trees, these women are inexorably connected — mother and daughter. The viewer learns that despite being separated for years and belonging to different worlds, a rootedness has remained throughout time. The potency of the beginning moments of the film foreshadow what is to come: a reclamation of split-off parts of self, frozen in both of them, that only the two of them together can move through.

Chiara seeks out her mother, who left her 35 years before, by infiltrating her mother’s fundraiser. At the end of the evening, there is a moment of silence as the two make eye contact. This moment is one of recognition; as Anabell retells it, “I saw myself in her.”

They meet to discuss Chiara’s cryptic request: that Anabell spend ten days with her. Chiara is shocked to hear that Anabell kept her daughter's existence a secret, saying “It’s weird. Almost not existing.” This speaks to a profound truth: when her mother left, she died psychically. Unable to reclaim her unlived experience, she struggled through life, not quite living, and becoming ill. The request is a plea for reparation, to live out her primitive agonies with her mother, to experience and repair the breakdown, and be able to live. The two of them, virtual strangers, head off into the woods together to Chiara’s childhood home.

In the remote depth of the forest a paradox takes hold, in the space where mother and daughter once lived together, where the trauma of Anabell leaving hangs heavy amidst many other memories. Chiara’s father describes “immobile memories” saying, “Some memories move and help us live. Others, get blocked. If we can’t set it back in motion it drags us down.” Mother and daughter are catapulted into the past as younger states in Chiara emerge and a deep reservoir of anger and yearning surfaces, serving as an opportunity for mothering that got disrupted. Anabell rises to the occasion, her penance and redemption riding on her ability to take these attacks and survive them, lovingly.

At one point Chiara shows Anabell photographs. In some images, she has spliced together old photos of herself with her mother at the same age, about which Anabell offers, ”There is insight, perspective. An idea. A yearning.” Chiara responds viscerally to being met in this way: “I want to spit at you.” In her despair and fury, Chiara hurls a teacup at Anabell’s head, then immediately worries about her destructive attack. Anabell continually weathers these attacks without retaliation. As she says in a scene where she is gardening, “These flowers are strong. They can survive in hostile terrain.” Anabell is assuring Chiara that she is strong enough to bear witness to her primitive agonies. She accepts the position of the one that failed her and in doing so helps her reclaim her life. And through this, we also see Anabell thawing, we see what seems like a hollowed-out part of her start to fill as she makes her amends and reclaims some of her liveliness.

In the final scene, Anabell has agreed to one final act on behalf of Chiara — to help her die. As she carries her into the lake, surrounded by a quiet beauty, both of them naked, she makes the ultimate sacrifice and loving gesture as a mother. The water is reminiscent of birth, amniotic fluid, of baptism. Chiara entered the world in this way, and now, in this last act, is able to live again through her death, ushered by her mother.