ZINNIE Harris is a master dramatist. We know this from her stage plays such as Further Than the Furthest Thing and This Restless House (her remarkable adaptation of The Oresteia by Aeschylus).
She is also a successful screenwriter (not least on the BBC hit series Spooks) and an excellent stage director (on numerous superb productions, including Caryl Churchill’s A Number). It should come as little surprise, therefore, that A Glimpse, her debut as a screen director, should be such an accomplished piece of work.
Also written by Harris (below), this short film (it runs to just 16 minutes) is inspired by her own personal trauma. Part of the “Grief” series in this year’s Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, it is based upon her own devastating experience of pregnancy loss (the director suffered a series of four miscarriages). The film will be streamed online by the festival until midnight tonight, and it will have a further life in future, courtesy of production company Compact Pictures.
There has long been a magical realist dimension to Harris’s work, a trait she shares with that other brilliant dramatist Dennis Potter. She brings it to bear here, in what seems, at first, to be a recognisably domestic situation; albeit a painfully anguished one.
Kate and Leo (played by excellent actors Kirsty Stuart and Jordan Young) are a regular, young couple. They live in a regular flat with their two young children Stella and Angus.
However, no sooner has Kate made a foray into the loft than she is no longer her normal, happy self. Leo finds her in Stella’s bed clutching the child tightly. Kate becomes distracted, and worried that she is beginning to lose her mind.
The cause of this distress is that, during her visit to the attic, Kate discovered a portal through time. She was, it seemed, face to face with herself four years previously, when she had just suffered the loss of a pregnancy.
Kate is caught between doubting her sanity and wanting to alleviate the anguish of her younger self. Harris’s ingenious premise takes us to a place where grief is so powerful that one can be caught between a self-willed delusion and an almost palpable, alternative reality.
Whether Kate is experiencing a figment of her imagination or another, metaphysical realm, she is doing so as a consequence of the overwhelming urge to bring solace and hope to her grief-stricken, younger self. It is a compelling idea, rendered all the more so by the very quotidian environment in which it is set.
AS a tragedian, Harris is accustomed to writing about human experience at its furthest reaches of physical and emotional pain. Here, however, she is recalling an almost inexpressible sense of loss that she herself experienced, and multiple times at that.
Kate’s attempts to reach back and reassure her desolate self of four years before spring imaginatively from Harris’s own thoughts and feelings. This reflection upon the female character’s experience, both of pregnancy loss and motherhood, is achieved with a paradoxical combination of subtlety and intensity.
Harris has compared the short film form to a brief poem, and her movie reflects this. Our humdrum, everyday lives are, inevitably, invaded by overwhelming experiences and emotions.
The film captures this enigma of human existence, not only in relation to Kate herself, but also within the relationship between her and her partner. Try though he might, Leo cannot feel the pregnancy loss as Kate feels it.
NOR can he grasp the power of emotion, the profound pain that has taken Kate back four years to her earlier, bereft self. In both the writing and the directing, Harris has found a shorthand that expresses the almost unbridgeable gap that such trauma can create between a couple.
The visual aesthetic of Harris’s film is deceptively straightforward. Initially, it depicts, as many TV dramas do, the low level mayhem of domestic life.
However, as the piece unfolds, the camera is drawn, as if magnetically, towards Kate, both now and then. By contrast, when it comes to relations between Kate and Leo, Harris has, already, in her directorial debut, found the technique for visualising the distance between two people.
The prosaic setting conflicts deliberately and meaningfully with the metaphysical aspect of the narrative. Harris captures this, too, by means of moments of superb lighting and, through her camera work, palpable uncertainty.
Stuart is an actor of exceptional emotional range, and she plays Kate with the required subdued intensity. Young is unerringly concerned, yet frustrated, as Leo, while Ella Thorne and Leo Thorne are the quintessence of childish abandon as the protected and uncomprehending Stella and Angus.
A Glimpse, complete with touching denouement, is an impressive directorial debut, to be sure. Expect more from the camera of Zinnie Harris.
A Glimpse is streamed until midnight tonight by the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival: mhfestival.com
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