JC Rosette
*This review contains spoilers and mentions sexual assault.
Clik here to view.
A scene at the end of Death of a Girlfriend (2021, dir. Yam Laranas) explains much about the film and its sympathies. By this point, the nature of the crime and the identity of the perpetrator has already been revealed. On the interrogation table, the perpetrator imagines Christine’s ravaged body laid out in front of him. Dried leaves are falling, the music swells. He looks at her tenderly. Is he sorry for what he did? The scene is almost romantic, as if the macabre event that transpired was fated, an inevitable outcome of a transgressive love. It is this romanticization of a crime, however, that feels dated (at least for the more progressive-minded population), like a sentiment that comes from another decade or century when men could do the most heinous deeds and chalk it up to violent emotions springing from love, e.g., jealousy, possessiveness, or dark and murderous desires. Although at times, the idea that these emotions somehow absolve violence, still bubbles beneath the current veneer of our modern laws and public opinion.
In the beginning are three stories told by three men: the boyfriend, the farmer, and the forest ranger. A fourth character, the police investigator, remains disembodied, a seemingly objective persona searching for the culprit. We are then shown a sequence of recollections, a la Rashomon, as the men are questioned to establish events leading up to the crime. But unlike the Japanese classic, Death of a Girlfriend’s interrogation moves faster, with individual testimonies overlapping and bleeding into each other. A question posed to one man is answered by another in the next cut. Later, the contradictions between narratives are treated to quicker transitions, as if the men are responding to each other, trying to establish their own version as truth.
Clik here to view.
This is a grim murder mystery and guessing game rolled into one, and if only for the interrogation scenes, it presents a bit of heady fun. Here the men are distraughtly fending off suspicion against themselves. From the outset, the forest ranger and farmer are already under suspicion. Both clad in prison wear, they are handcuffed and treated gruffly by the investigator. The forest ranger seems aggressive, prone to shouting and gesticulating. The farmer, while more subdued, seems duplicitous and is involved in petty crime. Meanwhile, the boyfriend—in normal clothes and able to move his hands freely—appears the more stable character between the two, albeit a bit worse for wear. In some ways, these characterizations attempt to play with the audience’s own prejudices. Granted they are all men, and given the nature of the crime, are subject to immediate suspicion. But class, age, and occupation come into play, and the film pushes the audience to point an accusing finger at the two older men.
The problem is, today’s movie audiences can often sniff out surprise twists in films, and in Death of a Girlfriend, the twist is apparent from the outset. It doesn’t help that the boyfriend is the least suspicious initially. Nevertheless, there is potential entertainment to be derived in determining what motivations lay behind the crime. What convoluted series of events and misunderstandings led to this? What secrets will be uncovered? The truth, however, turns out to be pretty straightforward. The forest guard was honest about almost everything, his only crime being his extreme prejudice towards the farmer. Meanwhile the farmer, in desperation, has made up a few details to pin the incident on the ranger, who has long harassed him for gathering wood in the forest. And between the two warring men, the boyfriend had outright lied about being a boyfriend, among other things. There is not so much a series of misunderstandings as different self-serving versions of events either peppered with lies or of people acting on their unchecked biases. And yes, of course, it was the faux boyfriend who did it.
Clik here to view.
Testimonies are accompanied by flashbacks in the forest, but it is the boyfriend’s recollections that are most extensive. His version serves as the anchor, not only for events related to the incident, but to who Christine was. In his version, she initiates every development in their budding relationship. This includes the first time they walked along the forest path, their first kiss, the intimacies they shared. The tired trope of woman as both innocent and seductress is evoked. And here lies the larger issue with Death of a Girlfriend. At its big (yet unsurprising) reveal, the film features a brutal rape and murder. This scene recalls local TV crime re-enactments, except the violence is more gratuitous and sickening. And it begs asking, what is the purpose of showing this depravity? For whose pleasure or benefit is it to show this cruelty towards Christine—the same character who was extensively sexualized by her rapist-murderer through earlier flashbacks, and who we know only through the stories of three other men but never from herself?
There is a problem with these kinds of stories, where women are mere plot devices, subjected to inhumane suffering and never agential, never herself. The woman is sacrificed for a message, a point which can be infuriatingly ambiguous and/or unnecessary. What is it exactly in Death of a Girlfriend? Something that revolves around a distorted type of love, perhaps, or maybe about men’s anger, the dangers they present, and the lies they weave about the women they simultaneously vilify and worship. The point doesn’t seem commensurate to the brutality (it almost never is). But if events in our country are any indication, one can argue that Death of a Girlfriend remains an accurate indicator of our social and cultural climate. The movie seems to mirror and channel not only the continuing presence of gendered violence, but also, the erasures and marginalization of women’s views and perspectives. Disappointingly, it elicits these conditions not to critique or to question, but as given conditions that can be utilized as vehicle to tell a story.
At present, the onus continues to be largely on women and their allies to imagine better types of cinematic narratives for themselves.