Director: Tiffany E Lewis
Writer: Tiffany E Lewis
Cast: Christina Fuscellaro & Jessica D Hamilton
Running time: 7mins
Directors are obsessed with cutting and re-cutting their film. Sometimes it works out – the various Blade Runner cuts are an improvement on the dumbed-down theatrical release – but sometimes it ends up adding back in a lot of content that thoroughly deserved to be left on the cutting room floor (as with whatever dead horse Zack Snyder is flogging to Netflix next).
A Tale of Forgiveness is a remastering seven years in the making, according to its final credit sequence. Having had my curiosity piqued, I sought out the original – still available on Vimeo – to see what exactly the overhaul had entailed. Not nearly enough, was the answer.
The best part of a decade later, the two ‘versions’ are indistinguishable, save for one thing. After Tiffany E Lewis’ short wraps up its story, she has added an extra minute of rolling credits – most of which serve to inform us of another role she fulfilled during the original micro-production. Director: Tiffany E Lewis. Writer: Tiffany E Lewis. Editor: Tiffany E Lewis. Cinematography: Tiffany E Lewis. Camera: Tiffany E Lewis & Theona Lewis. Craft Services: (Presumably) Tiffany E Lewis.
This extra minute of text doesn’t really justify the film’s re-release, particularly having seen the original now as well. The story remains a dangerously simplistic depiction of an abusive relationship – featuring a hastily cobbled together ending, that does not treat the combustible subject matter with due care.
As lead character Jane, Christina Fuscellaro does an excellent job of emoting, but is hamstrung by Lewis’ strange, lingering camera and stilted editing – reminiscent of John Waters, but without the irony. Fuscellaro is tasked with acting against nobody, pretending to be in situations and conversations she is not really privy to; and while her estimations are good, they seldom match the context they are placed into.
Notably, when Jane speaks to her therapist (Jessica D Hamilton, the only other human on camera), the pair are never photographed together. There is no establishing of the 180-degree rule, or even an approximation of it, suggesting they simply weren’t in the same set – and had no way of playing off each other. So even as Fuscellaro groans and rocks back and forth, her therapist continues to deliver an unblinking, sterile monologue about forgiving her abuser – as if she could not care less about the condition of her patient.
The advice written for the doctor to deliver is itself utterly bizarre. Conversational therapy, where the therapist does all of the talking is already strange enough. But as Jane struggles to get a word in edgeways, her doctor contorts her way through a set of inane mental gymnastics, which follows that the only way Jane can forgive herself for the abuse – which wasn’t her fault – is to forgive her abuser, whose fault it explicitly was.
What transpires seems vaguely to be delivered as a punchline. Lewis sends her protagonist back to the home she has fled, with the premise that she is going to forgive her abusive ex. But upon opening the door, she shoots the unseen resident in the face, without a word, in broad daylight – and without a silencer. After burying the evidence (again in broad daylight, in a public park) and committing possibly the laziest ‘perfect crime’ ever committed to film, Jane sighs contentedly to herself: “Now I can forgive him.”
When she first made this movie in 2017, Lewis was a film student. She will not be the first or last student filmmaker to grab on to an intensely serious subject only to completely mishandle it. Treating domestic abuse, or the failures of the legal and care systems to support survivors, as the means to setting up a clumsy joke is utterly tone-deaf.
But as reprehensible as that might be, students generally learn from their mistakes and move on. Returning to the scene of the crime seven years later (presumably having long since graduated) and churning out a re-release of the same film twice, suggests that Lewis hasn’t learned much of anything.
A Tale of Forgiveness should have been a lesson learned – a failed experiment, which provided its creator with some much-needed insights on how to handle a production – and not to mishandle important social topics. But uncritically dredging it up now, without even trying to amend the narrative of the original cut, does not reflect well on anyone. This was better left as ancient history.