Hanami

It helps to think of Hanami, the first feature film from Denise Fernandes, as a film of two parts. Roughly. The first part establishes a poetic tone very much steeped in magic realism. The subsequent second part anchors the story on concrete ground.

Our hero, Nana (played impassively and impressively by Sanaya Andrade in adolescence), is born to a Cape Verdean family. Her mother Nia (Alice Da Luz) leaves soon after her birth, and she is passed from one woman’s arms to another in a stunning scene near the start of the movie.

While still a child, Nana falls sick with a fever and the experience opens a portal to another world. She may be hallucinating, but as a story about a mermaid told by her grandma makes clear, there isn’t too much separating the fanciful from the real in the storytelling culture she’ s born into.

This otherworldly section of the film is steeped in the poetic. It is handled very well but it does go on for a bit too long. We get several figures with a somewhat folkloric claim to reality. One character here is Japanese and it is he who first mouths the title of the film. Later, someone uses it in a poem that’s about as beautiful and elusive as the film itself:

Hanami in the sky./Soft, my love/is rose-coloured.

Apparently, Hanami is a Japanese concept that we are told is ineffable—in the way the enjoyment of abstract things can be. In this case, the enjoyment refers to the falling of cherry blossoms, but maybe just maybe it refers to Fernandes’s film, filled as it is with beautiful images and turns that do not readily give out meaning. But, yes, back in the real world, years go by and everyone gets older. Some of the people who disappeared from the island and the narrative return. It is at this point, that Hanami succumbs to the good old-fashioned concept of suspense, even if it is of the muted kind.

Nia returns and a few questions arise. How will daughter receive mother? What does mother have to offer a daughter with whom she is estranged? The first answer is easy: awkwardly. The latter is complex. Both answers are handled delicately by Fernandes who wrote the script with the relatively well-known Telmo Churro. Everything from this point onwards is non-elliptical, the elusive nature of the film having melted into something different. Emotions and meaning comes to replace the pleasures of atmosphere and visual poetry.

At this point, the film reveals its hands. While concerned with the poetry of an ordinary life and the spiritualism of the Cape Verde and much of West Africa, Hanami also frets about the concrete problem of living in a place that will not ordinarily, readily support a certain kind of dream, even if it yields dreams of its own idiom. Nia’s explanation of why she left her child behind will never quite fly with a certain kind of viewer. But that disagreement is one reason this section of the film would prove relatable to viewers who would potentially be scared off by much of the film’s metaphysical elements.

The adept handling of this bit of the film, by Fernandes, Da Luz, and Andrade, is likely to provoke one question: Why isn’t this mother-daughter relationship parsing longer?

Who knows? But there’s a hint in the director’s note provided by the Locarno Film Festival, where Hanami has premiered. Fernandes, who was born in Europe to Cape Verdean parents says she wants to make the small island country “visible”. Well, mission accomplished.