... one last Sundance review from Murtada Elfadl
Early on in Farewell Amor, Angolan immigrant Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) sits down to eat with his wife Esther (Zainab Jah) and teenage daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson), they talk about all the years they spent apart. Walter moved to New York to escape the Civil War and was hoping to bring over Esther and Sylvia, yet they were stuck in Tanzania for seventeen years. That's a long time to be apart; Are they still a family or just three strangers trying to avoid the awkwardness of small talk?
It’s a moment of fraught emotions and stilted silence. Yet as Mwine, Jah and Lawson play it, it is also a moment of guarded release. The wait is over, there’s awkwardness, doubt and trepidation but also hope...
This coming so early in the film, made me realize I’m in for a treat. Writer director Ekwa Msangi, who based the film on stories she heard about her relatives, is attune to the intricate ways of how people grow apart and find each other again. She sets the narrative as a hand off between the three characters. We start with Walter and the life he has built in New York and trying to reconcile that with Esther and Sylvia being part of it. Then Sylvia as she tries to assimilate in school, make friends while balancing out the gulf between her parents. And finally Esther, a stranger to her husband, a stranger in a new country, tentatively putting together the pieces of Walter’s life in NY without her and Sylvia, while trying to ignite their passion.
Mwine, Lawson, Msangi and Jah
Immigration and visa issues take a big toll on people’s lives and lead to separation and sometimes destruction of families. They are not an abstract issue and therein lies the strength of Msangi’s storytelling. By focusing the story on these three characters, their one bedroom Brooklyn apartment and their neighbors and friends, she finds the human element in these stories. That palpable recognition of hurt, loss and longing that jumps off the screen.
Jah, a TV and theatre actress whose most well known role to date was on Broadway with Lupita Nyong’o in Eclipsed, is a real find for the big screen. Like all great screen actors you can read the slightest tremor of emotion on her face. As Esther sets out almost alone and alienated to find the truth about her husband, there’s plenty to read. She also has wonderful chemistry with Joie Lee who appears as a neighbor who guides her through Brooklyn. As Esther finds truths about her family and herself, we fall in love with Jah as an actor in total command. Mwine has an easy sexy swagger that makes us understand Walter’s appeal particularly in a gorgeous scene where he visits a dance club.
The film only falters in setting up its denouement around a dance competition that Sylvia enters. Dancing as a way to express oneself is cinematic but also obvious and makes the plot schematic. Yet the power of the performances carry it through.