neither/nor
pirjo honkasalo’s trilogy of the sacred and the satanic
troubled waters. But she did get involved here in ways she never has before or since. In thinking about how to write about this film, I’ve had battles of conscience of my own that have been persistently disorienting and disturbing. This film left me bereft and uncomfortably adrift and that’s why, of the three films, it moves me the deepest. After Pirjo meets the girl and her father Peter, she goes to film in the small dark room where they’ve been living. It has been six months since Tanjuska has been outside the wall. As if speaking to a reporter, Peter talks in a calm and even tempo as he tells the story of how they ended up there. Pirjo’s camera moves over his shoulder every so often to gaze at Tanjuska who gazes back at the camera catatonically, prone on the bed behind her father. During
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Peter’s long narration, Pirjo’s camera moves around the small space, noting the stinginess of light and air and that the only way they can boil water is by putting the business end of an electrical plug in a pitcher of water since the only outlet seems to be placed in the middle of one wall where only someone of great height could reach it. Sister Naenilla and her fellow novitiates and Jamana Lal and his family physicalize their pilgrimages as they grapple with attaining inner enlightenment and moving themselves forward on the spiritual wheel. But Tanjuska has chosen a solely interior pilgrimage of her own making, remaining silent as she works her way through her own stations of fear and love, puzzlement and certainty, gain and loss, good and evil. We never learn anything about