Director: Carice van Heusden
Writer: Carice van Heusden
Cast: Shauni Goetz, Simon De Winne, Berthe Tanwo Njole
Running time: 33mins
Our social, economic and political moment is one defined by a state of internal contradiction. Never in any time in human history have the horrific shortcomings of our civilisation been so apparent – the results of poverty, starvation and genocidal war are writ large across every social media feed in the world – and yet we remain wedded to the systems which time and again yields these results. The demands of the daily grind require us to bury our trauma, or be left behind – leading us to move on without examining what might need to change.
De Bomen Houden Grote Droefheid Vast [The Trees Hold Great Sorrow] is in many ways a depiction of this moment. It is a story of whispered, peripheral impulses, and compartmentalised personalities. It is an examination of how compartmentalising trauma can enable us to ‘survive’, and whether that is sustainable, or even desirable.
Alula (Shauni Goetz) is a woman plagued by some unnamed trauma. A faceless, amorphous dread follows her at every turn – and so she has withdrawn to a remote cabin, with her partner Orpheo (a brilliantly passive-aggressive Simon de Winne, who is tirelessly pleasant, but clearly from a perspective of simply wanting a return to a more convenient time in their relationship). But even here, Alula finds she is still unable to function ‘normally’ – falling back into half-realised hallucinations during mundane tasks, from making tea, to holding dinner conversation.
Increasingly, Alula responds to this by drawing a line between ‘reality’ and her trauma. Her memories, thoughts and feelings around her past are burdened on a fictional, compartmentalised Other. Rather than processing the unspoken source of her trauma, confronting what that says about her life, or what she might need to challenge and change in the world around her, she invents a fantasy in which the version of her subjected to that trauma is someone else. And for the sake of moving forward in ‘normal’ life, she sacrifices that someone else, to be subjected to those horrors repeatedly, in a cordoned-off corner of her subconscious.
But writer-director Carice van Heusden works hard to leave us wondering if this is the black-and-white positive that Alula’s worldview paints it as. Most prominently, Van Heusden uses Lucas Vandersmissen’s cinematography to do this.
In this dichotomy of broad strokes, ‘reality’ is made up of naturalistic, kitchen-sink footage, framed in a way that it becomes easy for us to work out the primary object we are being presented. Meanwhile, Alula attempts to organise her trauma into a shadowy netherworld; one where Vandermissen’s camera fixates on abstract edges of figures, or unrecognisable close-ups, while shifting and irregular sounds emerge and disappear back into the surrounding darkness.
But even after this divorce of the two Alulas takes hold, the camera shows us how fragile this compartmentalisation is. In the ‘real’ world, the wider the framing becomes, the more potential there is for something to obscure what we are seeing, or for us to pick out shadowy corners in which some hideous unknown known may still lie in wait.
As the credits roll, a steadfast sense of dread remains hanging over proceedings. In the most straightforward way, this might be because Alula has not ‘addressed’ her trauma in a way that will enable her to live with it, if she encounters a new trigger. As suggested by the intricate cinematography, there will always be something in the periphery, which if observed, could shatter her illusion of being someone else. But at the same time, there is also a certain anxiety which comes with the idea that this illusion can be sustained.
Van Heusden refuses to be drawn on what the source of the trauma is. What Alula has done to herself is, in that case, universalised. It is a direction for us to think about how we might similarly be repressing the darkest or most destructive moments of our lives, for a sake of ‘normality’. We are not learning or challenging the social forces around us that have caused us pain – we may even end up perpetuating them ourselves.
Carice van Heusden has gone to great lengths to construct a disquieting and uncomfortable world in De Bomen Houden Grote Droefheid Vast. Sometimes she may be a victim of her own success on that front (finding your face aching as you squint to pick out vague details from what seems to be the inside of a burlap sack during the ‘trauma’ sequences isn’t something that begs repeat viewing; and the audio track, which seems to chiefly consist of different asthma-attacks, pushed me to the brink of my own), it is courageous in its refusal to deliver a happy ending, contrary to a modern wellness culture that bids us to compartmentalise our experiences, for the sake of maintaining some great, monstrous ‘normality’.