Forging Female Identity

In Angela, Angela and her mentally ill mother, May, are tied with an invisible but unbreakable thread, a spell that can only be broken by death. This kind of intense parent/child twinning also exists in The Ballad of Jack and Rose. Even though this was my third film, I wrote it right after I made Angela. I rented a tiny bungalow near the sea, stayed there alone, and wrote without talking to anyone for a month. (Yet, because of how long it took to get financing, I kept rewriting that film for a decade). My premise was, what if the two characters who are left at the end of Angela—the father, Andrew, and Ellie—had stayed alone together, and were one another’s whole world? So, even though Jack and Rose became quite different characters from Andrew and Ellie, The Ballad of Jack and Rose is in a sense a thematic sequel to Angela, going even further to examine the child-parent relationship, to a point where it becomes so intense as to trespass on cultural taboos.

Jack and Rose live on an island, like Prospero and Miranda in The Tempest. The film is set in the ’80s, on an abandoned commune in the Pacific Northwest. Rose’s mother left years ago; Jack (Daniel Day-Lewis) has home-schooled Rose (Camilla Belle) all her life. Rose is, in a sense, Jack’s creation; she believes what he believes, and has become a sort of substitute wife, molding her character to conform to his ideal of femininity. However, early in the film, Jack realizes he is falling in love with his daughter, and so brings the woman he has been sleeping with, along with her two adolescent sons, onto the island in order to create an instant family and to distance himself from Rose and the danger he now realizes lurks beneath their bond. Of course, Rose, innocent of all context, explodes with rage and a sense of betrayal, yet the arrival of the strangers is the key to Rose’s survival as an individual. Without them, she would surely perish with the death of her mortally ill father. Unlike Angela, Rose survives the intense parent/child bond. She escapes her own funeral pyre and creates a life of her own.

With Personal Velocity: Three Portraits, I began to venture outside the family of origin as a subject and investigate women at a crossroads of identity within their adult lives. This is a film which goes deep inside three women—Delia, Greta, and Paula—women of different classes and backgrounds—and witnesses them each at a moment of cataclysmic change in their lives, looks at how they got there, and follows them up to the crucial moment of choice. I decided to use voice-over, both because a lot of the humor of the film is contained in it and also to free up the narrative. I thought of Personal Velocity as three feature films with the boring parts cut out. I felt tremendous freedom as I wrote the film, in part because I had already written these characters in a book of short stories. The way that happened was, around the year 1999 I had pretty much abandoned the idea of filmmaking when after eight years I couldn’t get money for The Ballad of Jack and Rose (or rather, I had the money and lost it, something that happens to me at least once a film), and another film had also collapsed. I wanted to make a life telling stories somehow, I was too impatient to wait forever for someone to give me money to make films, I had a baby, and so I retrained myself to write fiction. Once I was done with the story collection and had found a publisher, my friend, the legendary independent producer Gary Winnick, called me to ask if I wanted to make a low-budget film as a part of his InDigEnt film project, wherein Gary had a deal with Bravo to make ten low budget films with proven filmmakers. (Pieces of April, by Peter Hedges, and Winnick’s own Tadpole were also among them.) This offer was what brought me back to filmmaking. With Gary’s encouragement, I chose to adapt three of the stories and make a trilogy.

The first story I chose for the adaptation was “Delia,” about a woman caught in an abusive relationship with a man she loves. Delia was born as a character when I was living in Dublin with my husband; he was busy making a movie, my days were free, I had writer’s block, and I felt adrift. I volunteered at a local women’s shelter a few days a week, working in the daycare area with children ranging from two to thirteen. The women who lived at the shelter were very strong, ultra-tough women. It was hard to imagine them as victims. I remember one shiny young volunteer at the shelter recounting a conversation she had had with one of the abused women. The volunteer had been giving the woman facile advice, about leaving her husband and starting a new life. The woman had stopped her and said: “Have you ever been in love with a man who hits you?” The young volunteer had said no. “Then leave me the fuck alone,” said the woman. That exchange was the seed of the story “Delia” and of the film portrait that came later. I was trying to build a believable person: the strongest of women who is rooted by love to such a degree that she can’t break the bond she has with the man who savagely beats her. In my film, the moment Delia (Kiera Sedgewick) finally gets out is the moment she is locked in the basement by her husband, having been thrown down the stairs, and hears the terrified screams of her children. She realizes that they too are being brutalized, even if they are not the ones being beaten. She has to construct a new identity, and she does that by drawing strength from her earlier self, when she was the school slut, and used her sexuality to give her a feeling of power. This reconnecting with her past gives Delia the strength she needs to push into her future alone with her children.