A discussion of Double Freedom dir. Lisandro Alonso
How did the film’s form strike you?
J: I feel like it felt kind of clean. It focused heavily on the wilderness, but the landscapes were very monochrome and kind of aesthetically curated, you know, like, it was very…like flipping through a photobook. And it was hard to notice any sharp cuts of the camera. It felt very—especially for the first time I was watching it—very smooth and quiet.
S: I agree with a lot of that; it was definitely very quiet and clean. I thought the shots were very beautiful, but as for the form I think the long shots were a little too long for my taste. During the beginning when he’s cutting down the tree, I just was like: oh, wow, this is taking forever. I know a lot of that was to emphasize the silence. To be honest, the silence made it a below average film for me.
J: I gotta disagree with that—I loved the silence. I thought, because he was alone for so much of it, or only with his sister, the silence gave it a very eerie quality, where I was just him in a landscape that you can tell is vast, but the camera won’t tell you how vast. And the crickets were always chirping, and it all contributed to a feeling of peacefulness and emptiness that was nice in the beginning, but it had an underlying tension that gets explored later on.
What did you make of Micaela’s wandering?
J: I feel like they both kind of wander throughout the movie. It starts with him [Misael] wandering, but then there’s these differences between them—there’s a deep uncertainty to the way she wanders versus the way he wanders. You know he’s gonna come back home. He goes out, then back again, and then out, then back again, and so on, and he’s just living his life; cooking, doing his job, and that’s the first half of the movie. And I feel like with her it was way more purposeless.
And it was…it highlighted an underlying tension created by how vast the space is and how isolated they are. But the plain he’s living on isn’t really shown until a long shot when she comes back home with him after she’s released. And we know she has a habit of aimless wandering so it felt, then, like the movie was showing us why we should be afraid. I feel like it kind of drew us in to relate her psychology to the endlessness of the landscape. I was nervous whenever she wandered because we’d been primed to rely on the fact that he always goes back home, but now, she might not.
S: I think the word you said—purposelessness—is what struck me about that. Because he doesn’t want to [wander], but it is for [a] purpose. It’s for his work, and he’s someone who is intertwined with his society, and he goes out on his wandering, but it is for a reason and for his community, because he’s sending the wood to other farmers or whatever. But when she comes in, she’s misaligned by society, she’s out of that asylum and she just wanders around purposelessly, and I think it draws that distinction, and highlights that theme of abandonment in her storyline.
How did this film expand your worldview?
J: I think it may be a little superficial, but it made me more appreciative. It made me think a lot about safety nets in our own countries, because it’s a very common thing where our social safety will fall through and that burden will suddenly fall into families, but that doesn’t—it happens here, but not nearly as much. In the movie she’s released from the asylum, and then he has to take care of her. He clearly doesn’t have the resources for it and so it made me think, like… he has to manage with so little. /I/ don’t even know what /I/ would do if that happened to me. Also, when I was looking at it and watching the movie…they’re so peaceful and he seems not well off, but his life seems pretty stable. Like, he’s almost a baseline for stability because he’s almost completely self sufficient, his job isn’t going away. But I think it kind of highlights the way that, no matter what, because of how our societies are constructed, there’s an inherent instability to our lives, where even the most basic things a poor farmer might benefit from, like psychiatric aid for his troubled sister, can be revoked at any point.
S: I felt that it made me think a lot about literacy, when that’s highlighted in the film, which I didn’t catch actually until you pointed out that they can’t read her medication and how healthcare is inaccessible. And how that would affect you in having to advocate for your own care and having to take care of yourself.
J: It was also that he couldn’t admit that he couldn’t read. He didn’t fully understand the doctor’s instructions because, in the scene where he’s given his sister’s pill, the doctor refers to a written chart and it’s clear he doesn’t fully understand, but he doesn’t admit it. If he admitted it he could’ve gotten clearer instructions so, I think part of it was not being able to read, and part of it clearly had to do with being ashamed of his illiteracy. It’s also interesting that, yes, he’s ashamed, [but] he doesn’t suffer for that—she suffers for it. Like they’re both socially disadvantaged from a lack of education but, in the end, she takes the wrong pill and gets, according to her actor, lost forever. So I thought that was interesting.