“An Eternal Daughter, An Eternal Heartache”

by Rola Elnaggar

“What do you expect me to do when you say you’re not feeling well? It’s like a nightmare.”

Anyone who has ever loved someone platonically, romantically, or because they’re family has experienced this sentiment—this need to fix what is wrong—the discomfort that follows when you realize your own helplessness in the situation.

My mother has this cough. A knot in the back of her throat that loves to appear at the most inopportune of times. There is always this looming risk of choking. It scares my mother. And it scares me. I watch my mother go through it until it subsides, and I remember watching Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter.

The movie opens with two Tilda Swintons arriving at a secluded, mysterious hotel in misty surroundings that seem empty, except for a rude, permanently bothered receptionist and one employee. Swinton plays Julie, the daughter, and middle-aged filmmaker, and Rosalind, the elderly mother. Julie’s father had recently passed away, so she decided to treat her mother to a trip to this hotel, which was a former family house of Rosalind’s filled with good and awful memories. Julie set two goals for this trip: celebrating her mother’s birthday and writing the story of her relationship with her mother for a movie.

Torn between selflessness—wanting to make this birthday and trip special for her mother—and selfishness—wanting to work and advance her career at the expense of her mother’s dark memories and turmoil—Julie struggles to write anything. She regrets bringing her mother to this place, because to write this story, she is forced to make her mother relive her struggles. Julie describes the discomfort with telling the story of her mother as trespassing.

I believe this is the way familial love should be described: a catch-22.

The love between a daughter and her mother is haunting, a bond for life that goes beyond the grave, that comes with residual heartbreak.

For a daughter, you never stop loving your mother, even if she is cold and reclusive. After all, daughters are a reflection of their mothers—hence, the reason for casting Swinton in both roles. By understanding your mother, you receive a glimpse of how your life may unfold. Wanting to write this personal story seemed almost like an excuse on Julie’s part to get to know the mysterious Rosalind. In one of the most gut-wrenching, truthful moments of the movie, Julie pleads with her mother saying:

“I’m trying all the time to make you happy. I can’t keep guessing. You’re like a sort of mystery person to me. And I’ve spent all my life doing this. Trying to figure out how to make you happy.”

At this point in life, Julie is a filmmaker and a wife, not a mother. She has no child, but she is maternal to those around her, taking care of everyone’s needs. Watching this portrayal of dread and grief leaves you with the feeling of a rope slowly encircling your throat, lacerating your skin, and hindering your ability to breathe as you stress over Julie’s life, wanting her to be happy as she does for her mother.

There is this fear of time passing, hiding behind all their exchanges. The mother is elderly, and Julie is afraid she won’t have enough time to connect with her. Their conversations are strenuous and tiring to watch; there is this disjointed rhythm to them. Julie is also getting older, and she is scared she won’t have someone taking care of her when she is her mother’s age. Like the fog surrounding the hotel, there is a sense of impending separation clouding their conversations. Julie’s internal struggle is the inevitability of losing her mother, which makes this story essentially a gothic ghost story, with no ghost, just memories. Until it’s not.

During a conversation over the dinner table, while Julie hands Rosalind her birthday gift, Rosalind vanishes. Rosalind was never there, to begin with. She was a figment of Julie’s imagination. All of their conversations were created by Julie’s internal thoughts. Rosalind died, and Julie is visiting the old family home to connect with who her mother was.

The movie becomes a story about grief. The house/hotel becomes a visual and palpable representation of Julie’s state of mind.

Although it’s stated that the property is empty at the beginning of the movie, it isn’t. It’s Julie’s mind that was empty. She could only think of her mother. When Julie couldn’t sleep because of the banging noise, it was her soul-stirring worries and her thoughts full of grief that were keeping her up at night. The hotel seemed haunted; dark lighting, eerie music, and creaky floorboards were all used to convey this spookiness. However, it was all used to symbolize how Julie’s mind was haunted by regret. In the end, the fogginess surrounding the hotel is the grief clouding Julie’s mind, which is cleared up by the end. Julie finds a resolution: change is inevitable and she must accept it.

There is a frightening desperation in avoiding heartbreak. It’s guaranteed to catch up with us. It’s a thought I battle with every other day. Watching my mother full of life, running errands, watching TV, or simply talking and gossiping fills me with immense gratitude and a lot of dread. I’m always scared of the day when this storage of mundane moments will expire, when I will have to rely on my feeble memory to recall them accurately. Such thoughts can kill the enjoyment you ought to experience during these moments.

I’m a fan of photo albums. If the hotel in the movie is Julie’s personal memory box, photo albums are my memory box, literally. I love watching history unfold through these photographs.

I love seeing moments in my mother’s life when she wasn’t my mother yet.

I love watching photos of her as a kid and a teenager. I love watching pictures of her as a new mother, holding me and trying to get me to smile at the camera. But sometimes, I find photos of the first gray hair and the first wrinkle. Sometimes, I see myself standing taller and stronger than her.

I would like to imagine my mind as a room where each drawer contains a part of me, my fears, my dreams, and my memories. When I watched this movie, it felt like Hogg had opened the classified Do-Not-Touch folder of fears that I refuse to open, because the thought of it is sometimes scarier than experiencing it. In one particular scene, Julie apologizes to her mother for bringing her to the house to which her mother said: “That’s what rooms do. They hold these stories. And we’re here now. And that was then. And there’s just this muddle in me, of when it is, exactly.”

I would like to think that Hogg stole my room analogy, but she’s simply a master of her craft.

When I saw Julie sacrificing her personal life to make her mother happy, not communicating enough with her husband, or having any friendships, I thought of my own life. I thought of all the moments I went out with friends instead of spending time with my family, wondering if time would be kind to my choices. It’s hard trying to reconcile the anger and frustration I might sometimes feel towards my family with the love and fear embedded in me since birth, and seeing Tilda Swinton create conversations with her imaginary mother, powered by this dilemma, felt like another scene stolen from my mind. How many times did we lock ourselves in our rooms and start imagining all the arguments we could have said to win a fight, or how we imagined our parents acting more kindly and compassionately and just saying all the right words, everything we needed to hear and was never said?

The Eternal Daughter is art imitating life. It’s the work of horror flicks. The film is faintly inspired by The Shining—the tension between family members, the wintery atmosphere, and the gothic mansion—but instead of being filled with supernatural elements, this hotel is filled with childhood memories from the time of War. A heavy package inherited from one generation to the other, whether you want it or not.

This movie left me in a state of contemplation. Introspection. The way your thoughts go down a rabbit hole, one thought unlocking another thought unlocking another thought.

The Eternal Daughter provides catharsis, answering every existential question I have ever wrestled with, and that ultimately led to depression. The film reminded me that I’m not alone in my anxiety-inducing thoughts.

It showed me how we live eternally through our family members, how they are a part of us, how taking care of them is taking care of ourselves, and how both their absence and presence are heartache and pleasure.

CONTRIBUTOR’S STATEMENT:

For as long as I’ve lived, my identity has been interwoven with characters and places I’ve never met or visited. They have been my friends, my teachers in life, and my therapists when I needed one. My mother was pregnant with me when she went to see Titanic at the theatre. I would like to imagine the beautiful melodies created by the resilient band permeating her body and landing right into my ears, trapping me into falling in love with movies forever. The first time I learned about schizophrenia was when I watched A Beautiful Mind, and it led me to research it more to understand it better. Then, I learned there were other faces to grief and family after watching The Darjeeling Limited. And when I felt really lonely and anxious, I put on a movie and waited for the characters to commiserate with my pain through theirs. It’s a strange symbiosis. Cinema is a storytelling tool, a mirror, and a podium to announce incoming and upcoming change. No one knows which one started first. All we know is cinema has provided over the years many representations of mental health problems that made a lot of people feel seen, raised awareness, and offered solutions when it was possible. I’ve always considered the most noble of pursuits is to entertain, to make someone smile, laugh, or even cry, to just let them purge their pain, and cinema has always been a healer, a teacher, and a friend to me in the most visceral of ways—since the very beginning. I’m a storyteller thanks to cinema.